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Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

That's one way to do it. I wish people would embrace the idea that an ecosystem moving forward does not mean that you need to move forward. It creates so much needless pressure in people's minds. In the absence of security considerations, updating software might actually be considered harmful.

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They usually have some software created by some students in the 2000's. These people took their degrees and left years ago. Nobody will get paid to migrate this software and you can't get a degree for working on rewriting code. That's it. I was making backups of floppy diskettes last month with some obscure software. Windows XP is still king in many places because no drivers for ancient scientific hardware on Windows10 and Linux is "black magic".

> and you can't get a degree for working on rewriting code.

Which is sad, really, because we really could use more people who can do that. In fact, I really wish that every CS program had a requirement to take an existing code base and do material work on it; it's not like anybody's going to graduate from school and then get hired to do greenfield development, so it'd be kind of nice if they were actually trained for the things that they're going to do in practice.

It’s also sad that backwards compatibility of runtimes is not considered essential.

Personally, I love it.

If only university's had some way of getting funding from, I don't know, something like teaching courses, that could be used to pay people to maintain and update the software they depend on.

I just finished a Graduate diploma at a local University, a single subject had over 100 students each paying $3500 to do that subject alone yet the Uni tried to claim they didn't have the staff/resources to update that course (that was 10 hours of face to face class time) each session. I find it hard to imagine that running that one session cost even a fraction of the $350,000 paid by students to run such that there was nothing left over to fund resourcing for updating the materials.

The simple reality is there’s no economic reason to do that.

That $350,000 goes towards staff, facilities, and research projects.

If they had the choice between funding new cutting-edge research or migrating some obscure legacy code, the new research will always win. It’s not even a hard choice.

and that just makes you wonder why they expect students to keep paying them to do courses they wont even do the basics to ensure they are relevant and useful.

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