Just to offer a compari-trast to the viewpoint of this article: X11. Two of the examples cited are the direct result of the attempt to throw out the X Window System. If there are any pieces of software that exhibit properties of serious stability, then the X Window System is surely among them--not to mention exhibiting a de facto "doneness". Wayland, on the other hand, seems to be a perfect example of a piece of software that enjoys an undue image of "freshness" because of its recency and level of activity--i.e. the trendiness that the post lambasts--while in practice seeming to be in a state of being perpetually never ready.
Besides X11, there's the Web for stability, or at least a subset of it. That's a subset of the subset that includes everything that has been standardized, implemented, and widely available since let's say 2000, 2005 or so. It's perhaps one of the most stable pieces of technological infrastructure that we have examples of. But in the face of this, we have people advocating that we throw away this stability in favor of another approach (Gemini) that is supposed to deliver on some vague promises of fulfilling its purpose better than HTTP does. In reality, it looks like another example of NIH and the flakiness of hobbiest programmers' fleeting interests and will probably be deader 10 years from now than Flash. Whatever the case ends up being, Gemini is needlessly incompatible with existing Web infrastructure, given its advocates' ostensible priorities of stability (and it goes beyond mere irony, considering the places where they are similar--but just not similar enough to be compatible).
The author mentions Sway and i3 window managers as examples of finished software. I'd be interest if anyone has more examples. What is a piece of software that is feature complete in your opinion?
A couple more examples I can think of:
- jq: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
- pass: https://www.passwordstore.org/
- tokyo/kyoto cabinet: embedded key value database
- awk: text processing tool / programming language
- (almost per-se) any game that shipped on physical media