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All the commenters trying to shoot down the article with their fervour for modern apps deployed onto cloud infrastructure are failing to see the irony. Their s

All the commenters trying to shoot down the article with their fervour for modern apps deployed onto cloud infrastructure are failing to see the irony. Their shiny app that they built a few years ago and is deployed succesfully into a companies systems, it will be maintained for a few years. Then some people will leave. Then documentation (if there was any) will be lost. A few rookie developers will be brought in and will try to learn the system and add a few widgets or features on. Then in 20 years time, the app will be like the COBOL programs running on dusty mainframes. History repeats itself

tluyben2 6y ago
Most people believe that their software won't be used for more than a couple of years at most, especially young people who (seem to) think companies just rewrite everything to the latest and greatest (currently js/react; tomorrow something else) every few years. So they are not thinking about 2 years let alone 20 years. As someone who is maintaining products written (by me) 15 to 25 years ago, I know that I was absolutely wrong about that assumption. A company will not touch software if it works, no matter what the latest or greatest is and no matter if it looks like crap. I shudder to think, with JS projects breaking between minor versions of libraries, what happens if there is an issue 20 years from now... Egotistical really to use 'the latest and the greatest' and then just let 'the next person' live the pain of supporting that. You can say whatever about php and java but 20 year old code works fine with very minor changes; I have Node/JS code from 2 years ago that doesn't work anymore at all after security updates.
- collyw 6y ago
  20 years of real world testing is worth a lot than some unit test suite.
  - couchand 6y ago
    Well that's a false dichotomy if I've ever heard one. All those years of running in production will do nothing for you when the business asks for tweaks.
  - lwkl 6y ago
    My experience is that you learn how to work around bugs and crashes because they won't get fixed and you need to get your work done.
- nix23 6y ago
  This! Other examples for good Software that maybe lasts forever is tar, groff/man, fat-fs, vi/m, emacs etc.. There are lots of perfect working 'little' programms.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  As Equifax has shown us, some companies don't even update libraries when there are clear risks associated with them.
- flukus 6y ago
  > You can say whatever about php and java but 20 year old code works fine with very minor changes; I have Node/JS code from 2 years ago that doesn't work anymore at all after security updates. Doesn't that also depend on any libraries used? Java and the core framework have been stable but the rest of the ecosystem not so much. I do think we have a stability crises in "modern" tooling, if your a company that wants to upgrade your old COBOL code to something that will run for another 30 years of little to no maintenance then there are very few options. C, C++, maybe java and PHP are the only mainstream options that have shown any long term stability and even with those you have to be very careful about dependencies.

tluyben2 6y ago

Most people believe that their software won't be used for more than a couple of years at most, especially young people who (seem to) think companies just rewrite everything to the latest and greatest (currently js/react; tomorrow something else) every few years. So they are not thinking about 2 years let alone 20 years. As someone who is maintaining products written (by me) 15 to 25 years ago, I know that I was absolutely wrong about that assumption. A company will not touch software if it works, no matter what the latest or greatest is and no matter if it looks like crap. I shudder to think, with JS projects breaking between minor versions of libraries, what happens if there is an issue 20 years from now... Egotistical really to use 'the latest and the greatest' and then just let 'the next person' live the pain of supporting that. You can say whatever about php and java but 20 year old code works fine with very minor changes; I have Node/JS code from 2 years ago that doesn't work anymore at all after security updates.

collyw 6y ago
20 years of real world testing is worth a lot than some unit test suite.
- couchand 6y ago
  Well that's a false dichotomy if I've ever heard one. All those years of running in production will do nothing for you when the business asks for tweaks.
- lwkl 6y ago
  My experience is that you learn how to work around bugs and crashes because they won't get fixed and you need to get your work done.
nix23 6y ago
This! Other examples for good Software that maybe lasts forever is tar, groff/man, fat-fs, vi/m, emacs etc.. There are lots of perfect working 'little' programms.
rbanffy 6y ago
As Equifax has shown us, some companies don't even update libraries when there are clear risks associated with them.
flukus 6y ago
> You can say whatever about php and java but 20 year old code works fine with very minor changes; I have Node/JS code from 2 years ago that doesn't work anymore at all after security updates. Doesn't that also depend on any libraries used? Java and the core framework have been stable but the rest of the ecosystem not so much. I do think we have a stability crises in "modern" tooling, if your a company that wants to upgrade your old COBOL code to something that will run for another 30 years of little to no maintenance then there are very few options. C, C++, maybe java and PHP are the only mainstream options that have shown any long term stability and even with those you have to be very careful about dependencies.