What is the nature of deprication/legacy code?

[vptran31]

Hi.  I am trying to frame the question as this : "When a software or hardware update is available, but not everyone takes it, what happens, on the technical IT side?  Different versions of python or windows for business being examples.  One of my comp sci professors said the main job of a programmer is maintaining legacy code?  What does this mean?"

[Funce]

I would argue the semantic that a programmer's main job is instead to solve problems.

In my experience, maintaining legacy code has mostly been around security and stability.

It's a fact of tech life that if there's something new, not everyone will use it. Some people just like to use what's already there.
In other cases, the transition can be too costly to do so. (Upgraded hardware required, business downtime etc)

 

Its quite the vague question. But very interesting to ponder.

[justsomeguy]

For deprecation, when something is deprecated the developers are signaling that it is going to be removed in a future version to give people time to move away from whatever was deprecated.  They can still use the current version and whatever was deprecated will still be supported, but it's going to be removed soon.