Re: New to RPG

The issue, to my mind, is that way too often a program written years ago has quirks that solve a business problem and the purpose of the quirk isn't readily apparent when deciding to rewrite the program in a new paradigm. The result is that suddenly a business rule is broken and everyone is screaming and setting hair on fire. Or worse, no one notices and tons of damage is done.

It is understandable that twice burned, a manager will say "If it isn't broken you can't fix it; you can only break it. Leave it alone."

My own choice, given the decision to make, would be to do rewrites every generation or so by application, not by program. A cycle of maybe 12 years? I have code out there still running from the 1980s. I shudder to think of how brittle that code must be by now.


On 4/30/2017 8:10 AM, Buck Calabro wrote:

I agree with your assessment, but I especially agree with this.

Copying code without understanding it is killing us.
If we understood it, we'd never copy it -- we'd write better.
Not because the code is old per se, but because that pattern is no
longer the best fit to the problems it is being twisted into solving.
--buck