Re:Perl is 25 years old today
by btilly on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @04:17PM
(#4939634)
COBOL.
People still run production COBOL programs, today, that were written in the 60s and 70s. They may compile it with a version of COBOL that has support for features like object oriented programming. But the programs were written decades ago, and do not use those features.
I know one person who, 10 years ago, went back to work for the same company that she had worked at 30 years prior. Among other things she found a PL/I program that not only was around, but the last commit on was hers. She asked them, "I'm the last person to touch that, and I don't even know that language any more! Why are you still running it?" The answer was, "It never broke." (Sadly that company went bankrupt in the financial crisis, so her code is probably now dead.)
Re:Perl is 25 years old today
by MichaelGG on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @05:28PM
(#4939975)
A few years back, we bought a commercial address processing/validation library to use with .NET. I noticed it had a dependency on the .NET Fujitsu COBOL runtime. So even newer development might pull in COBOL code without even knowing it.
People still run production COBOL programs, today, that were written in the 60s and 70s. They may compile it with a version of COBOL that has support for features like object oriented programming. But the programs were written decades ago, and do not use those features.
I know one person who, 10 years ago, went back to work for the same company that she had worked at 30 years prior. Among other things she found a PL/I program that not only was around, but the last commit on was hers. She asked them, "I'm the last person to touch that, and I don't even know that language any more! Why are you still running it?" The answer was, "It never broke." (Sadly that company went bankrupt in the financial crisis, so her code is probably now dead.)
Code can live forever.