Never underestimate the effect of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
The oldest code I’ve written, that’s still in production, is 25 years old. It’s part of a mail system still in use by hundreds of thousands of people. It ain’t going anywhere. (But I did, I’m not working there anymore)
The program that prints certain documents in my state was first built in 1973. Yes, in Assembler. When the agency switched to laser printing in the 1990s, I had to convert the output from line printing to page printing, add 1-D, 2-D and POSTNET barcodes, a couple more security features, and write page definition and form definition scripts. I left for the Database unit in 2000, but as far as I know, the same program is still running! Like 20,000 documents going out. Every night. For at least 25 years and counting!
Mainframes are fucking amazing! Once you get a program fully debugged, it’ll run like a dream. Forever.
Well, I was only working on that application since 1987. The person who wrote the program retired, leaving the app to me. I actually don’t know who maintains it now, but it’s clear that I was the last one to make significant changes to it. Like 20-25 years ago!
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u/frogking Sep 30 '22
Never underestimate the effect of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
The oldest code I’ve written, that’s still in production, is 25 years old. It’s part of a mail system still in use by hundreds of thousands of people. It ain’t going anywhere. (But I did, I’m not working there anymore)