| This is just a subjective feeling, but back in the 90ies, everyone seems to have been producing code with only one goal in mind: have the compiled output work well enough so it can be shipped. There was next to no automated testing, there was some theoretical best practice, but at least in the windows world nobody cared. Heck, back in the days there weren't even multiple accounts on a machine, nor were there file system permissions for example. Of course, those old days are long gone by now, but software surviving from back then (like Flash Player) still has this legacy. As an aside: when it initially came out, Flash Player was called ShockWave Flash (.swf - ring a bell?). Flash was this lighter, simpler (and cheaper) version of the Shockwave authoring system. At some point it superseded it in features though. Some of this old Software can be rewritten, but most of it is still being depended on by independent third parties which require the mess to be bug for bug compatible. Combine that with binary file formats, the need for backwards compatibility, the need for newer software to read older file formats and in the case of Flash, the need for newer plugins to execute old, buggy bytecode because so many compiled swf files are out there of which the source (also in binary .fla form btw.) is long lost. It's so easy to look at Flash player today and laugh at Adobe, but remember: this piece of Software comes from a different age where nobody but the Unix guys knew better (and they knew better than to touch Windows). It's a good thing that it's slowly dying I guess. By the way: I'm as guilty as anybody else. Thankfully though, the age of dial-up is over so nobody is going to use that Windows dialer I wrote back in those days (despite its bugs, it was deemed good enough to win awards even in dead-tree publications). Where this does bite me personally though is in the Windows frontend of our product. I've written that abomination right after finishing high-school back in 2001. Unfortunately it is still in wide use and I have to maintain it which is ever so painful. In theory it really needs a rewrite, but by this time all new users are - of course - using the web frontend, so only people who don't care at all about technology are still using the windows clients (still 25% Windows 98 of all things) So rewriting the client and then pushing an auto update would be incredibly painful for them unless it's pixel-by-pixel identical. And to make this rewrite run on Windows 98. I don't even want to think about this. |