Comment by beyarkay

well, yes, exactly. I'm not trying to claim that old code is more reliable just because it was written a long time ago, I'm making the claim that old code is more reliable because of the survivorship bias. If code was first written 20 years ago and is still in production, unchanged, I can be relatively certain there's no stop-the-world bugs in those lines. (this says nothing about how pretty the code is, though).