Re:What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
by wheels on Friday September 09, 2022 @04:40AM
(#32776867)
Almost all software could be rewritten to be more concise. But SAP's actually too big to have one architect get an overview of everything and then conceive of an optimal solution. Anything with its level of complexity will have to have evolved to get to that point.
And if you managed to get it down to only 10% of its current size, it'd still be several times larger than the Linux kernel.
SAP makes copious amounts of money, so naturally people have tried to replace it. So far, they have not succeeded.
But there's literally decades of use cases and experience contained in that code. That's one major issue with people thinking about rewriting software, they vastly underestimate the amount of things in there.
I mean on the surface SAP is just a database with a UI and some business rules - 99% of software is - but that in itself is so often underestimated.
(Source: anecdotal, I underestimated 'just' a configuration interface, except that it had hundreds of models and thousands of fields. In hindsight I should've looked for an off-the-shelf data management thing where all I would have had to do was configure the fields and validation rules and some rough layout. Instead I tried to build it in naive Go, sqlite, a REST API and a React/bootstrap front-end. It's a great solution IMO, but not if you're a solo developer working on a domain that big).