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A comment on Avoid rewriting a legacy system from scratch by strangling it. Parent comment

Re:Avoid rewriting a legacy system from scratch by stranglin... by bdamm on Monday February 17, 2020 @09:01PM (#22352787)
Your guidance is true. However our industry is unfortunately also littered with well intended refactorings that resulted in any more bugs, feature changes, and customer impacts than the original developer intended, or even conceptualized as possible. So it matters a lot.

For example, refactoring "to provide abstraction so future work is easier" is 90% of the time an error.

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Re:Avoid rewriting a legacy system from scratch by stranglin... by cjfd on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @03:36AM (#22354430)
At some point it starts to sound a bit like 'whatever you do, don't touch a keyboard'. Rewriting everything from scratch? Very risky, please don't. Strangling you old application? Some comments here tell us that we should not. Perhaps they are right. Refactor your current application? 90% of the time it is an error.
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Re:Avoid rewriting a legacy system from scratch by stranglin... by SirSavary on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @10:31AM (#22356728)
Had the pleasure of working at a company like this. Don't rewrite, don't you do refactor, and a proxy? How do you even spell that?

The end result was me losing my "mojo" after a year of producing effectively nothing. I'm back together now but my god it's a terrifying feeling when you've been programming for over ten years and one day you can't make the code flow out of your hands anymore.

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