We're not just talking about art here, and we're not talking about geological timescales either. I think it's perfectly reasonable to think that if I compile a program for an operating system, it will still run okay in twenty years on the latest version of that operating system. The Linux ecosystem (and Microsoft in a lot of ways is the best at this) manages this pretty well, and I think they're getting better at it. That's why people can safely build things like nuclear control systems on Linux or Windows, and not have to worry about recompiling every single binary every 3 years.

(Now mind you, they should be recompiling every binary monthly, but OS vendors shouldn't be breaking everyone's builds unless security demands it.)