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Old Code Gets Younger Every Year. The threat of decaying technology looms, by Marianne Bellotti (medium.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev

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Archive link: https://archive.ph/A7LI4

Marianne Belotti has worked at large institutions with modernizing decades-old code bases. She is author of the book "Kill it with Fire" [review].

From that book's author bio:

Marianne Bellotti has worked as a software engineer for over 15 years. She built data infrastructure for the United Nations to help humanitarian organizations share crisis data worldwide and tackled some of the oldest and most complicated computer systems in the world as part of United States Digital Service. At Auth0 she ran Platform Services, a portfolio that included shared services, untrusted code execution, and developer tools. Currently she runs Identity and Access Control at Rebellion Defense. She can be found on most social networks under the handle bellmar.

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[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I can resonate with her view on excessive, deep dependencies and breaking transitions like Python 2 -> 3 as a larger threath than old COBOL systems. As e.g. Konrad Hinsen wrote, such breaking transitions are a problem for long-running institutions and endeavours such as science. And this includes computing infrastructure itself - for example, The Python Wiki is a MoinMoin Wiki , and this wiki software is still implemented in Python 2.7 since its authors did not have the resources to port it!

I note that such breakages affect my own choice of tools. For example, a while ago I started a personal project, a kind of a mini-database which is designed to quickly capture input, and allows to export and analyze data with graphs. The first version was in Python, but because I anticipate to use it for many years, I rewrote the second version in Guile.