
NEURON's incredible backwards compatibility - dragly
http://dragly.org/2015/10/26/straight-from-the-source-neurons-incredible-backwards-compatibility/
======
lokedhs
Now I'm being the "kids these days"-guy, but there are codebases that contain
much more old stuff than this one. Emacs is a good example, of course. But, I
suppose the granddaddy of them all is CICS which has been in active
development since the 60s.

~~~
dragly
Yes, there are definitely codebases out there that are older. I remember
reading about how Emacs is tested by volunteers on older systems just to make
sure new changes don't break compatibility. I think such stories are really
interesting because they reveal the history behind the software we use today.
And in some cases it makes sense to support older hardware, considering how
much of our society still runs on old, but stable, computers. Thanks for
mentioning CICS - that was new to me.

What struck me as interesting with the old code in NEURON is that NEURON is a
high performance simulator still in heavy development. There appears to me few
good reasons to run a simulation for a year on a Tektronix 4010 that would
take a minute on a laptop. So while I wouldn't be surprised to see Emacs' old
stuff still being used, I would assume that NEURON's old code is simply
abandoned and was never cleaned up.

~~~
lokedhs
The Tektronix 4010 is not a computer, it's a terminal. Also, xterm still has
support for its command language so you can still use it on modern systems.

I'm not saying that NEURON's code base is not old, just that using its
Tektronix support is not the best example to use.

~~~
dragly
I didn't at all think about the terminal/computer difference when I wrote the
above. You are absolutely right that this wasn't the best example.

