I've done the same thing he describes, of building a large system that would be quite small with modern tools. I wonder what could be to alleviate the problem.

I've done the same thing he describes, of building a large system that would be quite small with modern tools. I wonder what could be to alleviate the problem. Of course good factoring of code and using a high-level programming language so that the existing code-base is as small as possible help somewhat. It feels to me that the real solution would be to make a stronger separation between the business logic and the actual implementation. In a way the code for a piece of software is an overspecification of what that software should do. It contains both a set of decisions that are necessary for the problem, and some that are necessary for the actual implementation, but otherwise arbitrary. In some way, one should build a "problem model" that is executable. Then the actual system would interact with this domain model. Then when the software infrastructure improves, the problem solved presumably does not change as much and most of it could be reused.