
You Don't Know Jack About Software Maintenance - nreece
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/11/48444-you-dont-know-jack-about-software-maintenance/fulltext
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ramchip
The article mentions updating a warehousing software by updating individual
copies and making these interoperate with the older copies, so the system can
be progressively updated. It also talks about machines that would run without
ever being stopped or rebooted. Yet there is no mention of Erlang or updating
an application while it's running, which I find rather surprising.

~~~
mahmud
Erlang is a flash in the pan compared to how old these technologies are. IBM's
S/360 goes back to the early 60s, then came the S/390, and finally z/OS; the
hardware of the S-series could be hotplugged, the entire machine updated in
hardware and software _while_ it's running. Since the 1960s!

Like the articles says, us whippersnappers, 00s, cloud-this and distributed
that types know jack about this stuff. Kneel and kiss the ring! ;-)

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InclinedPlane
Very little software development is "green field" development, most of it is
maintenance of some form or other. Quite a lot of "maintenance" programming is
development of new features, rather than merely fixing bugs. However, very few
software projects are designed with these facts in mind.

