Many bank payment and loan systems are written in COBOL. Banks are so afraid to change them that there are often not even plans to upgrade them. When a change absolutely has to be made, they need to call the developers back from retirement...
Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
121–130 of 363 posts
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#122I'm still using a couple of Lisp macros I wrote in 1980 [0]. I think a few other people are using them too. I've improved them a little since then, but the basic concept is unchanged.
[0] https://github.com/slburson/misc-extensions -- specifically 'gmap' and 'new-let'
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#123In 2001, I wrote a tag balancer (for HTML input, it also did some rudimentary XSS filtering) in PHP and then translated it to Cold Fusion (I was applying for a CF job and figured it might be useful to actually learn it). I believe that both variations are still running, the CF version on Metafilter, and the PHP version was used in B2, which became WordPress. A few years ago, I was asked by the WP team to relicense th…
Wow, that's awesome! It must be great to see your creation live on for so long.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#124I wrote an expansion to the original SharePoint Team Services (STS) back in 2002. I was told recently by a student that their former employer (small mom-and-pop biz) still used STS and my software was why.
It was called the SharePoint PowerPak; it added a few features that "inspired" built-in functionally in later versions. Was primarily written by hacking apart the insides of STS and sending a few emails to some MS folks to get clarification on some undocumented thing that I was interfacing with. Color-coded calendars, categorized content in document libraries, tasks with an "email assignee" workflow, a Windows XP theme for STS, and a few other features. Was actually really proud of that one!
I then worked with another dev on a search add-in for STS called SharePoint PowerSearch. It was clever in that it used the little-known "_search" target for elements that, basically, opened the link into a sidebar frame that IE had back in the day. The mom-and-pop business had that installed too.
Those tools, along with a community site I ran, blossomed into the SharePoint training and consulting company I own today.
So that's two 14-year old products still in use at a small business in the Philadelphia area. Made me smile to hear about it.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like I have stockholm syndrome after using Notes from several years. I hated notes, but I really miss the 'Copy to New' function from creating new emails from already sent items. Anyone know of a client that supports this other than Notes? (sorry for the hijack)
Are you referring to 'Edit As New' in e.g. Thunderbird?
YES!
I don't know why I've never tried Thunderbird until now.. Looks like this was right there under my nose the whole time. Thank you!
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#126People still play the Warcraft III map I made in 2006, mostly in Russia. It relied heavily on an extension of the scripting language called vJass created by a genius eastern european hacker named Vexorian and was one of the most advanced of its type for a while. It was also ported to the DotA 2 engine, where it has millions (!) of subscribers.
Do you mean the original Dota map? The one from Warcraft 3
Dota2 now has community-created custom maps. I think he is referring to that.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#127I wrote the netcode, among other things, for Army of Two: 40th day. I suppose so long as the matchmaking servers are up then the code is available to be run. Last I checked for active games was well over five years ago, but there were several thousand players at the time. All of the code I wrote earlier has long since been abandoned, I hope. There is the CBT application I worked on for BP that was for safety training…
So were you working for the game and you were just assigned to the net part? Or did they hire you only for that?
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#128I still have an excel sheet that I wrote to perform mortgage calculations. The timestamp on the file is 10 March 1994. The latest version of excel can still open it and it works.
Although it exists, it's not in use.
I suspect all the stuff I wrote back in the late 80's and early 90's has long been switched off at some point, which is kinda sad. It would be hard to run today: EBCDIC mainframe stuff and 16 bit PC stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#129I wrote a hacky bash script back in 2000 to manage HalfLife dedicated servers (start, stop, edit basic config stuff) for a friend. This script (I initially called "hl.sh") is later renamed into "hl-monster.sh", and finally to "hl-monster-extended.sh" with ~15000 LOC, supporting 120+ different Games and is running on ~2000 really big servers around the world. This script is the core of a big international company now. I joined this company 3 years ago and since then, we try to replace this script, but it is so deeply merged into all systems.
What have I done?
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#130A flash-based CAD floorplan viewer I wrote in 2005 is still being used. There's been talk for the past half decade of porting it to javascript, but as long as browsers keep supporting flash I doubt it will happen.