Re: "34-year-old program"
"We haven't tinkered with this for a while...let's "improve" it"
God that mentality is everywhere! The code works, everything works, it looks good and consistent between the past major versions. But we need to sell it more, to make more money. We cant easily add planned obsolescence to it all the time so lets just revamp the UI! Remove the long used functions, especially the really useful ones that only a small % of users actually use. Add support for Javascript in the file format, we'll worry about a sandbox later, much later.
Lets do it because we can. We can test it when we roll it out to the real users, bye bye in house testers (this happened to me). Its never finished, just like when Lucas had Star Wars. IT CAN NEVER FINISH, IT CAN NEVER BE STABLE AND MAINTAINED.
I remember a scifi story (I think it was a series of books) that were set on some huge starship. The crew were a generational one and maintained/improved the ship over many generations as needed. They had code going back hundreds of years, maintained and running. Unfortunately I cant remember whet the series or author was.