[james_s_tayler]

Well you know my last job I worked on a system that was a lot of 4gl under the hood and a Java application that sat on top calling the legacy 4gl code. The 4gl code had comments in the header with dates and ticket numbers. The dates stated late 80s and 90s. The ticket system was from 4 ticket systems ago so that was useless. The comments had become wrong over a period of 30 years of changes. The rationale for something in 1989 made a lot less sense for 2015. The author was now the boss for the whole office and hadn't touched code in 25 years so I can't go ask him about this function he wrote in 1989.

Entropy. It's not our friend. It's why we can't have nice things. Code bases suffer from bit-rot over time.