FWIW, I have written over 1 million lines of BASIC for over 100 customers, most of it still it production, and all of it doing important work producing goods, s

FWIW, I have written over 1 million lines of BASIC for over 100 customers, most of it still it production, and all of it doing important work producing goods, services, and jobs in so many uncool industries we couldn't live without. No offense, but being in production for a long time is not an indicator of design quality. Some code is kept because it works well, other gets stuck in production precisely because it's a tangled, fragile and undocumented mess that people are afraid to touch. As I see it, the real measure of code quality is how easy it is for others to modify your program.