NASA spent recently a lot of effort (and i suspect - money) to find Fortran proficient developer to rewrite code working still on Voyager. ideal candidate was found finally at NASA. this begs a question - how much you can do in Fortran having 64kB of RAM and less than 3W of power? it’s completely different task than our typical computers, not to mention bad practices they learn to junior developers due to abundance of hardware resources.
the same can be said about todays network engineers - on five day, very intensive bootcamp CNDABC we’re talking a lot about engineering properly with Piotr Jabłoński and Piotr Matusiak. as we’re often challenged by the “just throw more CPU horsepower and RAM at the problem” or “just throw more bandwidth” we fell it’s simply bad practice to rely on inifinite hardware resources. i personally agree with Russ White when he states, that complexity is needed, but can be easily abstracted and layered - if we have proper knowledge and practices built into our operating and thinking model.
by the way - IRS according to GAO is still using computers that are 56 years old. a little bit newer - only 53 years old - are still being used in US nuclear siloses.
and now think for a moment that code running on these would be written by todays developer ;)