When I worked at Apple, I remember seeing code that was 15 years old

> The houses are better, and they go up faster...

This is highly debatable. They look better, but whenever I inspect the walls and see what is holding the house together, I just shrug and leave my contact info, because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.

> ...and building them increasingly feels like magic.

Engineering should not feel like magic to those with a proper education. Otherwise, we are merely practicing alchemy.

As part of my current assignment I see code and tests that are 15 years old (or more), and I only hope that people who wrote this code have become better as software engineers since then. Otherwise there is no hope for humanity.

I joined Asobo Studio[1] for an internship back in 2010, and some code there was already nearly 15 years old as they grabbed the remains of Kalisto[2] including the engine/editor. That editor (Pawap) is still used to this day, although the engine (Zouna) has been rewritten (but uses the same data backend as the old code, albeit heavily updated too). This was probably the oldest codebase I worked on at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalisto_Entertainment

I have an active project where parts of it still uses on the back-end WebObjects, an ORM framework originally from NeXT and later apple. Over the years parts of it are being rewritten (WebObjects is not threadsafe) but it just keeps running and running processing millions of transactions per week.

Windows 10 shipped with code that is from the 90's. Old does not necessarily mean bad. If it ain't broke.

> Every file had a comment at the top with the date and the author’s name.

Yeah that is most likely less about pride in the craftsmanship and more likely a reflex from bad source version control software.

EDIT: Also, you know they didnt type these comments by hand right? And that the first code completion systems date back to the 70s, granted it was mostly spell checkers.

> The houses are better

Are they? Why? Even in the brick metaphor that doesn't work.

The good old days when people were people and not just IDs

15 years. Lol.

I worked on a reactor physics simulation app with 50 year old code then, which is now approaching 75 years old now. It compiled on Windows and *NIX.

Somewhere people working in Sabre are laughing...

15 years ago people weren't crafting artisanal lines of code to build by dry-stacking.

I bet some of the oldest artifacts in code say "TODO" or "Temporary work-around"...