Being forgiving towards the user is one of the important principles of programming. Because the user may not be able to “upgrade” his system.
Windows 95 is still very much alive.
Embedded-like systems are a thing.
Windows 95 is still very much alive.
Embedded-like systems are a thing.
Yes. If there is one thing I wish I could drill into every programmer's head, it's that not breaking stuff for your users is the #1 most important thing. There is one of you, and there may be many thousands of users. You putting in the extra effort means saving thousands of times of effort from your downstream users. Sometimes breakage unavoidable, but those instances should be rare, extremely well communicated, and felt as a failure to be learned from and avoided in the future. I don't care how ugly it makes things for you, your users are paramount.
I would say that's #2. #1 is to never cause data loss.
Did not say it has to be done.
Can you share any examples/use-cases? I'm not doubting you, I'm just very, very curious.
In 2011 a customer I worked with was using Windows 95 still in a test bed for their legacy equipment. The test software they had was written for it, and it still worked, so no need to go through the massive pain of updating. But even that was 12 years ago and we expected it to fall apart any day...