An example worth considering is TeX, which is now 43 years old (considering only TeX82; the earlier TeX78 was a substantially different piece of software). There has been some maintenance over the years, it's true, including a few feature additions in 1990 (TeX 3.0), but I would suggest it has shown itself to be extremely durable.
At the heart of this are two wildly different technologies:
- Literate Programming which was developed so as to work around limitations of the Pascal development stack as it existed when the project was begun: http://literateprogramming.com/
- web2c which allows converting .web source into a format which may be compiled by pretty much _any_ C compiler
LP was described by Knuth as more important than TeX, but it suffers a bit from folks not understanding that it's not so much documentation (if it were, then _The TeXbook_ would be the typeset source of plain.tex) as code commentary only useful to developers working to extend/make use of the application --- there really does need to be some sort of system for manual documentation, but I suspect that it will continue to be a talented technical writer for the foreseeable future.
Except that it's not clear whether the intelligence† that underlies their homing ability is equally effective in helping them evade predators.
†Is "intelligence" even the right word here? I don't know. Much depends on how you define it, I guess, combined with the unknowability of the pigeon's own mental processes.
If you view the source it looks like they goofed and don't actually have any white space between the elements in the rendered example. It's just `<ul class="inline-block-list"><li></li><li></li></ul>`.
When I try the code they show on the page myself the space is displayed.
Yes, agreed! The first time I visited San Antonio (as a Brit who was based in Dallas for some months) happened to be at exactly that time. We didn't know anything about it, but found ourselves on the river walk in the evening, and along came the parade of boats bringing Pancho Claus & co... it was a lovely surprise and a beautiful evening.
It does, but those would only be applied if the `font-variant-ligatures: historical-ligatures` property were specified, so they don't appear on this site.
I inspected for a ligature and any evidence of CSS kerning being turned on before commenting, but I didn't test it to see what the page looked like with it turned on, so I didn't have active knowledge of the possibility of a ligature. If I'd know, it would have been better to give wider scope to the possibility that somehow kerning was being activated by OP's browser. I should have known better than to make a remark about a font without absolutely scrupulous precision! I actually appreciate the comments and corrections.
It got better when tools like ObiWan came out to do basic lookups from your computer, along the lines of "what book and page is this function documented on?".
("But couldn't you just jump to the definition in your IDE?" Oh, you sweet summer child. First of all, most IDEs didn't have that functionality. Second, the header files didn't contain documentation. If you were lucky, they might have the argument names.)
