This is totally me just being naive, I don’t work in the software realm but do have an interest possibly one day, but if we have stuff that’s been able to run (seemingly) successfully for years, or maybe even decade, what maintenance needs to even be done on old programs? Is this simply for people discovering security vulnerabilities and patching them? Is there more to it than that?
In: Technology
You would be surprised. You implement a counter and figure “oh ill make it 6 digits long”. Then the software runs 10 years. And the counter hits 1000000. The software either crashes, the counter goes negative, or rolls back to 1 so now you have repeats in your system. So someone has to go maintain the software and increase the counter to 8 digits.
Meanwhile, by the time you notice, the system has rolled back to 1 and has reached 102. Now you have 102 duplicates in your database. So you have to retrieve those more recent 102 records and add 1000000 to them so they are unique again.
You wouldnt believe how often these small oversights happen!
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