[idlewords]

My livelihood depends on a large set of Perl scripts, and I bet I'm not the only one in that position. It's perfect for gluing things together and then not breaking for decades, while other languages come and go. It's kind of the new COBOL that way.

[macintux]

I’d love to eventually settle into retirement by maintaining some unloved Perl.

[juliusdavies]

Recently I wanted to see if some code I wrote still worked on Java 1.x.

The only way I could get Java 1.x to run (among my fleet of existing machines) was by installing the windows JDK version to run inside Wine on my Ubuntu.

Native Windows 10 could not run Java 1.x. This surprised me, since in my previous experience Windows was pretty amazing for maintaining reverse compatibility.

(I guess I could grab a super-old Debian docker image like Debian 6 and see if the linux Java 1.x binary would run on that, but I wanted to stick with machines I already had running.)

[djbusby]

I make money off "old" systems; I'm spending time with Perl too. Lots of legacy systems out there.

[cutler]

Which languages are most common in these systems?

[djbusby]

Well, I'm not sure about everywhere but, the work I'm finding is ASP3.0 (IIS6.0) and VB6 (more rare) also Perl and PHP. Many of these projects were started in the late 90s. They are internal systems (billing automation, internal work-tracking, custom "ERP"). Nothing exciting, just old shit that makes money in a non-tech business. I find the work on LI, and I show up when folk search for these olds skills. But I know a few others in this "maintenance" space. One just does legacy Java, one just does old Windows (NT4, 2000), etc. Generally we find work from each other.

Additionally, I think it's hard to enter the "Legacy" space. You have to un-learn some patterns, lots of: oh yea, we used to do this the hard way. The other bump is the documentation - the 1999 docs are buried under the 2009 docs which are decaying under the 2019 docs. The thing called ActiveRecord for example means like 99 things.

[cutler]

Do you find any of these legacy system clients are open to having their system upgraded to a modern version of the same or related language, eg. .Net for ASP? After all, it wouldn't involve a significant change in the business logic and most esablished languages are more or less backwards compatible.

[djbusby]

I hear that. I want that. But, mostly what I see is that at least once before a vendor shit the bed on a rewrite in $ModernX and then the business play became "nurse it".

And, having been through many rewrites myself, I frequently surprised they could hose the deal. It feels like scope-creep is the killer but I only have feelings for the data, no metrics.

[eduction]

join(“ “, @{$ounds->{really}{&fun}}) =~ /^[a]n+d\sgr8 4 (you(r|se) eye$/g

[akira2501]

Modern day ronin right here.