That’s what’s always amused me about the “code re-use” imperative. I started my career with Visual Basic 3 – what good could anything I wrote back then possibly do me today?
I work at a multi-bilion dollar company that would crash to a halt if our Cobol + assembly language Unisys system written in the 80s went offline. It’s hard to predict what will become difficult to replace, but some code has extraordinary staying power.
I wrote a web app circa 2001 (Visual Basic 6 and Classic ASP) that is still in use. Unremarkable except that this app was a graphical UI front end atop a clunky mainframe app from the 1970s. The fact that my app is still running means this mainframe app is still running.
I have some perl code still good after ~20 years. Personal accounting and bill prediction, command line with todo comments about a never made web interface
An architect’s building can last several hundred years. A programmers genius logic becomes obsolete in three years.
And the fools rushed code is still there a decade later…
You nailed it.
Except when it doesn’t. Then it becomes https://xkcd.com/2347/
Oh, I’ve got awful code from 20+ years ago still in mine.
Don’t worry there’ll be a company in 2095 that still using it. They’re always is someone.
That’s okay. The company is set to go IPO in two.
That’s what’s always amused me about the “code re-use” imperative. I started my career with Visual Basic 3 – what good could anything I wrote back then possibly do me today?
I work at a multi-bilion dollar company that would crash to a halt if our Cobol + assembly language Unisys system written in the 80s went offline. It’s hard to predict what will become difficult to replace, but some code has extraordinary staying power.
I wrote a web app circa 2001 (Visual Basic 6 and Classic ASP) that is still in use. Unremarkable except that this app was a graphical UI front end atop a clunky mainframe app from the 1970s. The fact that my app is still running means this mainframe app is still running.
I have some perl code still good after ~20 years. Personal accounting and bill prediction, command line with todo comments about a never made web interface
Tell that to leftpad.