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Never rewriting is a great way to save costs in the short term and also shoot yourself in the foot long term. Unemployment systems written in COBOL were perfect

Never rewriting is a great way to save costs in the short term and also shoot yourself in the foot long term. Unemployment systems written in COBOL were perfectly fine until we found they weren’t in March 2020. Maybe we should have rewritten those 20 years ago? That would have saved the NJ Governor from putting out a request for “Cobalt“ programmers in the middle of a pandemic. Let’s say GP and his coworker switch jobs in the next couple of months. Who is going to maintain an application built on a framework no one understands? At that point you’d have no choice but to rewrite it except now you don’t have the knowledge of how the existing system works. All of this without even getting into the security implications of using a framework that no one else is.

irrational 6y ago
The security thing doesn't concern me too much. In 20 years we haven't been hacked. Plus my company (Fortune 100) has literally hundreds of people that work in the website security department. They have gone over our code with a fine tooth comb and are constantly monitoring and trying to hack our site before someone else does. So far they haven't found anything in many years.
unclebucknasty 6y ago
>That would have saved the NJ Governor from putting out a request for “Cobalt“ programmers in the middle of a pandemic. The difference is this framework still runs on a modern platform (assuming it uses JS and other Web standards). So, it's dated only WRT other frameworks, which come and go anyway. So, unlike with COBOL (and "Cobalt"), it's supported by the platform of the day with standards many current devs know.