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I usually just see the term technical debt as a way to pedal the latest shiny programming environment. Coming from someone who works with COBOL, Oracle PL/SQL a

I usually just see the term technical debt as a way to pedal the latest shiny programming environment. Coming from someone who works with COBOL, Oracle PL/SQL and very old java code (I also work with 3.x python and Rust) the ability to fix code is easier than ever given the amazing tools we have today like modern debuggers and decompilers. Its no doubt hard, as we see, for programmers to write say an emulator for Nintendo, but it is definitely done today and they have no code usually to operate on at all. Also look at game modders who are injecting DLLs. There is entire subgroups of programmers whose day to day is just modifying the worst possible outcome in terms of technical debt (already compiled/optimized/obfuscated code). So anyone who mentions technical debt as an up front refusal to use some technology x to solve a problem, is really just doing premature optimization in a project and I think that is a real problem. To put it another way, any attempt to understand technical debt is to speculate on the future of Comp Sci and/or companies' licensing changes / mergers and is basically a complete gamble.

anticodon 8y ago
I think it's not that simple. Latest tools often increase productivity. Gamers can afford to spend days and weeks to add some feature to their favorite game. They don't have deadlines and they don't care about QA. It's another thing when you have to fix a bug or add a feature in a limited time with limited resources because business needs it.
- beiller 8y ago
  I try to frame it a bit more with regards to project management, where I feel any discussion of tech debt is bad for the project. To even start talking about it you have to start making many assumptions, for starters the assumption that the project will be successful to then later have to maintain. Then there are many many other assumptions to follow, and I feel that it is generally detrimental for it to even be discussed. It always involves some upfront price/scope/time on a project in trade for some future unknown cost savings. Fair point about the game hacking though they don't always have such constraints, but they do help close the gap by inventing these great new hacking tools!

anticodon 8y ago

I think it's not that simple. Latest tools often increase productivity. Gamers can afford to spend days and weeks to add some feature to their favorite game. They don't have deadlines and they don't care about QA. It's another thing when you have to fix a bug or add a feature in a limited time with limited resources because business needs it.

beiller 8y ago
I try to frame it a bit more with regards to project management, where I feel any discussion of tech debt is bad for the project. To even start talking about it you have to start making many assumptions, for starters the assumption that the project will be successful to then later have to maintain. Then there are many many other assumptions to follow, and I feel that it is generally detrimental for it to even be discussed. It always involves some upfront price/scope/time on a project in trade for some future unknown cost savings. Fair point about the game hacking though they don't always have such constraints, but they do help close the gap by inventing these great new hacking tools!