Man, this makes me sad. Not about the atrophied codebase, but about the inevitably extreme difficulty of keeping one properly maintained. Expertise in software

Man, this makes me sad. Not about the atrophied codebase, but about the inevitably extreme difficulty of keeping one properly maintained. Expertise in software maintenance isn't common and it isn't cheap. Every greenfield dev is going to eventually see his project handed off to people who won't understand or respect his conventions and methods. That mostly destroys it, but business requirements can put it on chemo and a food tube and keep it alive against its will for a long, long time, and it's not a pretty sight. It's practically impossible to. I've been maintaining an ancient Rails codebase for the last two and a half years. I'm perhaps the fourth or fifth such guy to do so since it was built. The project was never updated past a certain point release and it's more work than it would be economical to do to do that now. I'm experienced enough now to take it on, but both me and the company have better things to do with our time and resources. It is so ridiculously easy to make a bad decision that seems like a good decision that instead ultimately dooms the project. Software is like this weird life-form from another part of the galaxy whose motives are so alien to us that we can't even begin to come to grips with it. We know it's not actively plotting against us, well, pretty sure, but more than that? All you can do is shrug your shoulders and hope it doesn't consider you a threat today.