array 
Today I've learnt first hand of an enterprise with an IT staff of ~200 people stuck on a Java 6 (from... 2006!) codebase. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess they must be on their own, because it's been a while since it went EOL. That makes one think again on how difficult must be to migrate such huge codebases... And how difficult must be to patch it to keep the engines running on a daily basis. Sigh, computers were supposed to make everybody's life easier, but. :P
fedops 💙💛@array we still have about 75% of our codebase on Delphi. 😳
@fedops Delphi ranks quite high in the TIOBE index and it seems it's quite well maintained (by Embarcadero, if I'm correct), right? So that doesn't really seem that much worrying a priori, I believe. I've seen some job offers even here, so it must be actually used in enterprise environments... Now, if you tell me you are using some years-ago-deprecated version, then... Argh. XD Keep the secret, but I may have a chance of working with Java 6, and IDK if I'm more happy or just scared to death. :P
@array yeah, Embarcadero. It still works (somehow) and as long as the 32bit binaries still run on windows it's ok.
The stuff was written by non-devs who thought PCs are neat and the code looks exactly like you imagine it does. It's been on life support for over 10 years and I hope we'll never have to touch it again. We'll see. If something needs to be done it'd be better to start completely from scratch.
@fedops Sigh... I think I know what you mean by "written by non devs". In my former job there was a 3-person team who worked on an enterprise backoffice, mostly GUI but with some scripting stuff. Someone literally can't understand what you mean by "declaring a variable", and interfacing with their API was a sh*tshow... No input validations, case insensitive and no restriction for user names, passwords saved in plain text, API URLS with spaces (trailing and between words)... Lots of fun. XD
The Shell of a Fish Finger@array theres an awful lot of space stuff still running Java 6 (and earlier). You do not rewrite and recertify mission critical code unless you have to and someone else is paying.
@fishfinger Yes, I believe that may be true. But it still sounds a bit... Scary, I mean, running officially deprecated code in mission critical production apps... But that's how it is I guess. ;)
@array Their view would be that its a lot scarier running code that Oracle says is good but hasn’t been running for a decade.
The testing processes are insane though: aside from everything else you’ll spend about a month (even for relatively innocuous subsystem) stepping through every possible state the machine could be in and manually checking that it does what the spec says in front of lawyers and engineers from higher up subcontractors and ESA: any deviation gets the lawyers involved. Its brutal.
@fishfinger Sounds like that indeed. :) But I understand that sometimes a minimal bug can be very costly, just a couple hours downtime can translate to very big losses for some medium to big players, so I understand testing is very critical. ;)
@array It’s more that you don’t want to delay a launch or kill an astronaut. Things like the Mars missions have their launches scheduled decades in advance when the planets literally align. If you miss the launch the (contractual) costs are high.
And astronauts are just too valuable to risk. They are idolised.
@fishfinger Makes sense. :)