# Maintenance

*Maintenance is slavery of man to a machine.*

Maintenance is [shitty](shit.md) [work](work.md) whose goal is just to keep a piece of technology functioning without otherwise changing it. Maintenance is extremely expensive, tiresome and enslaves humans to machines -- we try to minimize maintenance cost as much as possible! Good programs should go to great lengths in effort to becoming highly [future-proof](future_proof.md) and [suckless](suckless.md) in order to avoid high maintenance cost. Always [finish](finished.md) your programs so that you don't have to maintain them anymore.

Typical "[modern](modern.md)" capitalist/consumerist software (including most [free software](free_software)) is ridiculously bad at avoiding maintenance -- such programs will require one to many programmers maintaining it every single day and will become unrunnable in matter of months to years without this constant maintenance that just wastes time of great minds. I don't know what to say, this is just plainly fucked up. Modern mindset goes like this: you create it, you maintain it until you die, so as a programmer you are supposed to create just one, maybe two noteworthy programs during your lifetime. Never adopt this mindset -- create a finished program, send it to the world and move on.

{ I've seen so much talent wasted on maintenance. One example for all: I once asked the creator of my favorite libre game whether he had any other games because the one he made made me quite happy, he replied "no, maintaining this game already takes up all my time". That's the world we live in. Imagine a painter being able to create just one painting, a composer composing just one piece. ~drummyfish }