4 ms·

Did somebody think the code would somehow disappear.

• rbanffy 6y ago
  I can tell you from first-hand experience people expected the systems would be gradually migrated to new languages (and out of mainframes) at some point in the 1990's. A lot of those migrations failed miserably. Others failed spectacularly.
  • commandlinefan 6y ago
    That was the mindset that got us the Y2K bug 20 years ago. I remember seeing a lot of fixes for the Y2K bug that looked like this, too: if (year > 50) { year += 1900; } else { year += 2000; } So expect another Y2K crisis in about 30 years.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      s/50/70/
    • rbanffy 6y ago
      Using two digits for years is not a language issue. You can migrate your systems from 2 to 4 digits without having to rewrite your code in Java 1.2. This was, in fact, how most of it was done.
    • ape4 6y ago
      Hopefully code like this is marked with a standard comment for future grepping.