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It's fine for fintech etc, but air traffic control software yes I imagine not so much.

Likely either outsourced or done by people who are comically underpaid considering how important it is

You know there was someone who tried to refactor whatever code it was that broke here and was told it was too risky.

I’m way more often than not on the side of refactoring but there’s risks on both ends with a mission-critical service like this. Neither side is zero risk, the choice is about which option will result in fewer and less severe outages.

Sure, the problem is most people can only see the risks of changing code. They're completely blind to the risks of not changing it.

It's also huge amounts of code for very old standards

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