[TMWNN]

>Also, decades-old software written by long-gone engineers at the factory still runs on the equipment, and nobody understands how the stuff works nowadays. Therefore, there is plenty of incentive to keep the old systems running and running and running.

Vernor Vinge figured this out 25 years ago. A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>

(This week I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)

[ozim]

I’d say most of current stuff is “get new guys, write it from scratch again”.

That is how you get new framework each year.

Maybe more people should be just software historians.

On the other hand rewriting stuff in new ways is beneficial as new processors come to life.