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stable, debugged code is really valuable Moreover, institutional knowledge is valuable. It's not just the code, it's the team of people -- both the users and t
by mechanical_fish 17y ago
stable, debugged code is really valuable
Moreover, institutional knowledge is valuable. It's not just the code, it's the team of people -- both the users and the maintainers -- who have decades of experience with the codebase.
Change the codebase and you throw that all away. Those of us who use thirty-five-year-old text editors to write software for a forty-year-old OS architecture that's running on a thirty-year-old microprocessor family understand this. ;)
- donw 17y agoPoint, but note that the editor, OS architecture, and processor are under very active development, and have been continuously improved over the past three decades, and are implemented in a language whose compiler has also kept pace with the times. In the case of the aforementioned business, the emulator to run their existing code on an x86 was the right move, because it could buy them a ton of time to move things to a newer architecture -- it's not like COBOL doesn't exist on x86, even today (OpenCOBOL). Moving slowly because you want to reuse a large, existing codebase with many happy customers is smart. Refusing to budge an inch because you're terrified of adapting to new market conditions... isn't.