> In a lot of ways, many of the problems just stemmed from age, it was an early 90's application in an early-2010's world. There definitely were some not ideal

> In a lot of ways, many of the problems just stemmed from age, it was an early 90's application in an early-2010's world. There definitely were some not ideal software development practices that contributed to difficulties as well. But I still had a sense that the previous developer had crafted this beautiful, unique, intricately complex and inter-dependent little world. I've had exactly that experience. It was an old Apache mod_perl CGI app that used labels and goto statements for flow control, and for well over a decade nobody wanted to touch it because of that. Once I dived in to change it I realized there was a method to the madness. Mod_perl essentially takes your code and wraps it in a sub (function), so if you have subs in your script and use any sort of globals, those turn into function variables, and their use in the subs causes closures. By emulating function calls with goto and labels this problem was side-stepped. Not how I would have done it (and not something I kept as I revised the script), but what at first appeared to to be complete insanity eventually ended up being based on the environment and the time it was built in. It's a good reminder that often what appears to be stupidity of the prior programmer is actually your own misunderstanding of the problem (and probably poor documenting of the problem as well...)