Lindy’s law

Lindy’s law, also called the Lindy effect, holds that the future life expectancy of a non-perishable thing, such as a technology, an idea, or a piece of writing, is proportional to its current age. The longer something has already survived, the longer it is expected to continue to survive. The observation originated as comedians' shop talk about which comedy bits held up over time, named after Lindy’s delicatessen in New York where the conversations reportedly took place, and was later formalized by the statistician Benoit Mandelbrot and popularized further by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

In software, Lindy’s law is invoked as an argument for favoring long-lived, widely deployed technologies over newer alternatives when durability matters. A programming language, protocol, or file format that has been in continuous use for decades, such as C, TCP/IP, or SQL, has already survived the pressures that kill most new technologies: better alternatives, changing fashions, loss of maintainers. Its survival to date is itself evidence, on Lindy’s reasoning, that it will likely persist for a comparable span into the future, where a technology released last year has no such track record to draw on.

The law applies specifically to non-perishable things, ideas, technologies, and works whose value does not physically decay with time, and it is a probabilistic tendency rather than a guarantee for any individual case. It is often cited alongside Wirth’s law and similar observations about the long half-life of software, in tension with the industry’s own preference for novelty.

See also

• Laws and principles

References

• Mandelbrot, Benoit (1982). The Fractal Geometry of Nature. \W. H. Freeman.
• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.