Legacy code isn’t tech debt either: it was right for the time... Edit: as an example that comes to mind, a bank running on COBOL doesn’t have tech debt unless

Legacy code isn’t tech debt either: it was right for the time... Edit: as an example that comes to mind, a bank running on COBOL doesn’t have tech debt unless their COBOL engineers are aware of their missed opportunities. If they think COBOL is no longer fit for purpose, it’s not debt, it’s time to reinvest. Should there be an analogy for depreciation? Some of the "best practices" in my current C++ shop are in direct contradiction to the Law of Demeter and related philosophical stances in Object Oriented programming (particularly ones espoused by Martin Fowler) despite the fact that my current shop advocates for OO. Neither the old position or the my current shop's position is so bad that it's not viable, though some hotheads in the field act as though this could be the case. A lot of the churn seems to be arbitrary and driven more by fashion than solid first principles. (Which would include cost-benefit analysis, for which there is often insufficient data, and for which no one wants to pay the cost to gather the data.)