> I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it.
What world are you living in? I work for one of the big 5 and 75% of the software stack features I use have been in continuously developed for over 5 years.
Yea ditto, I just fixed a bug in some other team's 5 year old code cus it was breaking on some of my team's stuff. Beyond some ungainly test code involving counting byte offsets, it wasn't that bad. The fix involved dropping in some other 5 year code via a library and voila it worked.
I get some of what gp is saying, some older stuff gets abandoned and not improved much, while other stuff gets modified so much that it's sorta like that "at what point does a ship become a new ship though gradual replacement of all timber?" question.
What world are you living in? I work for one of the big 5 and 75% of the software stack features I use have been in continuously developed for over 5 years.