I'm working on a greenfield project at a hotel where we've had to interface with a Mitel PBX over RS-232.
I was shocked how literally the ASCII codes were followed by the PBX. It sent an "ENQ" before each command, we had to send an ACK back, and then it sent us STX/ETX-delimited records.
I'm 32 and working today, in 2017. I hope I make stuff that lasts this long.
It's harder now, because any developer can make a fancy framework, draw some graphics, make a website, find a domain (on the .io TLD!) noone else has thought of yet, and look as good as (or better than) multimillion dollar companies. Anybody can compete now. And so, for the sake of landing a job, or networking/personal publicity, or even just for the experience, people do.
The problem is, frameworks and libraries a) are both easy and fun to write, b) are really hard to comprehensively test with full architectural coverage, and c) suggest some form of standardized behavior. While (b) creates technical debt, the main issue is (c) vs (a): we're flooded with "do it this way!" from a thousand groups, even in situations where the developer(s) didn't really intend for that to be their predominant statement.
With all this noise and chaos, it almost feels awkward to stick to old, icky, widely-hated legacy standards in the face of all this innovation. Or at least that's what it's felt like to me. Objectively thinking about it and comparing everything, though, nothing's perfect, but what's been around for a while has the combined benefit of a) having a fairly widespread mindshare, and b) having known solution patterns for a wide range of issues.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that building software on top of tried-and-tested methodologies is likely to produce long-lived results (which is fairly logical).
- I say "or better than" because large corporations often have standardized internal Web style guidelines and rendering toolkits/templating engines, and making sweeping changes in those is harder than for websites that are little more than a landing page and some documentation - so the bigger an enterprise is, the likelier it is that its website might look mildly dated.
I was shocked how literally the ASCII codes were followed by the PBX. It sent an "ENQ" before each command, we had to send an ACK back, and then it sent us STX/ETX-delimited records.
I'm 32 and working today, in 2017. I hope I make stuff that lasts this long.