Along those lines, Britain joined the EU a year after Smalltalk-72 and K&R C were introduced. Smalltalk inspired Objective-C, which is still used today in Macs.
The British Constitution can be seen as a large piece of legacy code which has never been tossed and rewritten from scratch, just incrementally patched and refactored over a really long period of time.
Downside: lots of bizarre complexities, bits of dead code, stuff that works as long as nobody touches it etc. Upsides: it's really stable.
Yea, it seems like yesterday it got announced. I was working in Berlin with an English guy, he took it super hard. We went out for drinks after work and at the end of the night he was telling one of the Germans they were lucky - because they were still in the EU.
