I worked for a software company that had a program of about seven and a half million lines of code. We were converting parts of it from FORTRAN to C in order to meet some technical objectives (probably graphics API compatibility). One of the programmers told me that “the problem is that they’re still writing Fortran but they’re writing it in C.” What he meant was they weren’t really taking advantage of what the new language could do because they were still stuck in old patterns. What prompted this video was a friend taking a course in Java right now and in explaining to her about how to do things I have to be careful that I don’t drift back into old programming ways that don’t necessarily work with Java as it is today.
This applies to a lot of things, not just Java, so give a listen and I think you’ll agree we need to be careful how we approach new things and let go of the old when we should.