I think it's not like a natural law. But several things help with it. Changing maintainers and committers for example. When the original ideas are lost, so is t

I think it's not like a natural law. But several things help with it. Changing maintainers and committers for example. When the original ideas are lost, so is the structure of the code. Also the quality of the test suite makes a huge difference in combination with the willingness of developers to refactor. No testsuite automatically means no refactoring. With a testsuite the question remains whether the organization penalizes or encourages larger code changes (sometimes with old code bases managers demand pinhole-surgery only). And then there is this funny thing that perfectly acceptable code bases age without a change to their code. Idiomatic C++ code from the 90ies is from our perspective not clean, even if the person who wrote it was a dedicated and smart programmer following the best practices that they could get a hold on. With functional code bases you might see similar patterns. A Haskell person of today may look at an older common lisp code base with similar reservations as a java programmer to the visual basic 3 app. I just sat down and wondered how a tech stack potentially used by a startup could age. In the future i think we will see much more dependency problems. When you get to maintain a Django/nodejs/ruby on rails application, you always take pypi/rubygems servers for granted (or your local mirror on artifactory). Think about the time in 40 years when the dependencies are not available. Or the small languages we sometimes see and still are able to find tutorials for, how will it feel to take over a Lua codebase in 40 years? I hope that enough docs stick around, but already when I browse the web on Smalltalk stuff most links are broken because actually information can disappear from the web. Or database technology. How will that NoSQL db appear to a maintainer in 30 years? So while today we are unhappily having to maintain software that was written without version control, it may be that future generations will have it even worse because they dont even have a monolithic code base in front of them but something with dependnecies they cannot install anew anymore.