"in the old days, before every system was connected (either directly or indirectly) to some kind of network, a certain code of conduct was assumed between developers, operations staff and users, that nobody would try to break anything."

If the 1970s count as the old days, then my experience was that developers had to assume that users were akin to the proverbial infinite number of monkeys and would eventually stumble across any slightest chink in the armour. Admittedly, this was usually out of stupidity rather than spite, but defensive coding and extensive validation was the norm, even with only kilobytes rather than gigabytes of program memory available.

The icon? Developer fuel...

One snag is the way that some tool vendors keep releasing significantly different toolset upgrades. Although I'm a fan of Microsoft's development tools/environments/languages etc., and most development shops can take these changes in their stride, organisations that do, or commission, a significant amount of internal development end up with problems. Not only is there the continual cost of training, but also the underlying framework on which a given application relies becomes often becomes obsolete in fairly short order.

Given that most organisations don't refactor their own apps EVER, but do try to keep abreast of new developments, they inevitably end up with a load of mis-matched, soon to be legacy, liabilities.

This breeds two evils. Firstly, even if the code doesn't have holes in it, the underlying frameworks in use probably will for the first couple of years and, more importantly, end users will start to use "work arounds" that may involve all sorts of spreadsheet and MS Access nastiness, to say nothing of things like exposing old databases that were designed for internal use to the Internet with huge attention to graphics but absolutely none to its basic suitability and security.

When I see these adverts promising "manageable code", "long term support", and all the other nonsense designed to tempt IT managers to part with their inadequate budgets, I say a small prayer that the ad's target market are a completely unreconstructed bunch of cynics who have to get wet before they'll believe it really is raining.

Windows carries a huge amount of bloat to ensure backwards compatibility, for perfectly sensible reasons - Couldn't tool vendors make a few more compromises here too?

Change isn't always good.

It was drummed into me as "it's all very well trying to make your software idiot proof, but the problem is that the world keeps creating bigger and better idiots".