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Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

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Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#231

Post by bigiain »

I still occasionally see this on shop shelves:

https://www.softwaretime.com.au/phonics-alive-1

I wrote most of the code for that (in MacroMind Director) in 1995 (I remember that because we needed to change the way we did a bunch of Audio when Windows 95 came out in about September that year - in Win3.3 we could do multi channel audio - but in Win95 we on;y had the two stereo channels so we had to mix a bunch of multi channel sound - we came so close to blowing the size of a CD ROM after that!)

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#232

Post by mk89 »

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #149
cm2187 wrote: post #121

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...

As crazy as it would be to learn COBOL today, I've heard you can pretty much name your price for these sorts of jobs. They're definitely out there, too -- I saw one job listing in 2014 for a postal worker credit union that was looking for someone to pick up rudimentary COBOL from a pending retiree so they could still support their system.

Indeed. A friend once told me that while he was studying Spring (years and years ago) his friend decided to steer toward something else: COBOL. Years later this guy is still dealing with such a "tool" - only difference: object oriented cobol - lol!

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#233

Post by ryanmarsh »

clamprecht wrote: post #199

ToneLoc (a war dialer), written in 1991, last version released 1994 before going to prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToneLoc People still have modems???

Thank you. I had a lot of fun with that as a teenager (and got into some trouble too). ;-)

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#234

Post by paulmooreparks »

The core user interface code in a point of sale system. I got a contract in 1994 at NCR to write an interface between the flagship grocery point of sale system and a new UI device called DynaKey. I was told not to polish it too much because they needed to get it out the door, and they'd go back and clean it up later. By 1995 I was writing the second version, which made the UI configurable. In 2008 I was back writing the third version, still in production today, but still built around the code I wrote in 1994.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#235

Post by itsthecourier »

penetrarthur wrote: post #211
fu86 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am only guilty for the first 100 LOC, the rest is not my fault :)

We had a guy who wrote the other 14900 loc in a similar situation and made the whole thing really crappy. He used to say we cannot blame him because he inherited the crappy 100 loc in the first place.

The 14.9k LOC guy is correcto. Let's burn in a stick the heretic 0.1k LOC coder

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#236

Post by itsthecourier »

hikarudo wrote: post #189
dagss wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You neglect something I think is very important: You do not normally know up front what code will live and not. If you carefully (over-)engineer everything you will perhaps not get time to write all those short-lived failures that preceded that long-lasting success. Of course I wish that piece of code that I hacked 3 years ago and never got around to refactor was better done the first time! But that kind of thinking…

Survivorship bias.

But HE survived

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#237

Post by shthed »

near wrote: post #106

There's an entire community of video game hackers (smwcentral.net) using a cross-assembler I wrote in 2001 named xkas. I added a few minor patches and by early 2004 I had released the final version, v06. I never really intended for anyone to use it seriously. I made it for myself, but went ahead and posted it online anyway. It is a 1500-line single-file, nearly-commentless, nearly-spaceless abomination of code with n…

I like this: http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/269/

"Newer versions have been released, however contain poor documentation, and removal of features that can be found in v0.06. Version 0.06 is still considered the best version available by most ROM hackers until the author addresses the shortcomings of subsequent versions."

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#238

Post by gdiocarez »

I wrote a school system using ruby on rails 2 due to the upgrade on rails 3 syntax change. It was not able to migrate database and change code since I was 1 man team on the company. I asked the company for another to help me out with the migration or change because there are parts of the system that is memory hog. It was my first project and don't know much about memory consumption of the app. Until, we are consuming more cloud resource cause I don't know the bottle neck is.

All the employees are more on PHP than ruby. It was sold to 3 school and 6 years after. It's still in use. I'm out of the company and suggested to move it to PHP for the developers to easily manipulate and maintain the app.

I went out of the company due to increase in task/ duties that I can't handle them all (customer service/ programming/ server maintenance/ explaining to my boss that I need another ruby programmer to help me out)

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#239

Post by steve371 »

fibo wrote: post #139

I knew an old man who is now retired who wrote something in COBOL For a bank, it is still running cause it calls itself and nobody understand ita eval tricks. It is still working and everybody is afraid of removing it. True story.

Once a large insurance firm was recruiting in campus and hiring ppl to maintain their old COBOL system

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#240

Post by michaf »

anotherevan wrote: post #85

I am the original author of LatexMk[1], a Perl script that runs Latex the correct number of times to ensure all cross-references and such were resolved. It can also run continuously with a previewer and several other goodies. I wrote it around 1993 to scratch my own itch, adapting it from a little script called “Go” by David J. Musliner. At the time I was using a literate programming tool that generated Latex from C…

I used latexmk to streamline the generation of my PhD thesis. I must have run your script literally hundreds of times. So, thank you!
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