thank you.

I was going to make a joke about how it isn’t all that surprising that a person with this history of language selection would completely misunderstand and misuse relevant technical slang in the English language. But I’m not supposed to sow discord so I won’t.

The author navigates the technology world very differently than I do.

Well, a more accurate comparison would be if you made a chair 20 years ago, and now no one makes chairs anymore because we have all become robots.

If everybody became a robot and there's no need for chairs, then to whom is the technical debt supposed to be paid?

If there are still fleshbags who need chair, the one created 20 years ago, if properly cared for, works just fine.

Now, if I used a piece of rotten wood for one leg, because I couldn't bet bothered to go fetch a new plank, this is debt that will need to be paid in the form of putting additional work to fix said leg later.

> The difference is choosing worse now to get it faster, that's technical debt.

Right, but we always do that. We always make some tradeoff to get things shipped faster. And that's fine, otherwise we wouldn't ship things. It's a balance - and the general meta of "all technical debt bad" is harmful to actually building working software.

But way too many times it is used as an excuse. If you are startup, fair enough.

If you have existing consumers, it's not. Spend that extra 20% making code maintainable or not picking the quickest possible solution. Spend that extra 40% on planning and designing feature that will be in your product for next 5 years

I don't understand the need for obscenities. Their are children on this blog.

nope; just checked, there are none

(and even the ones that are pretending to not be here said they don't give a shit)

There you go again with your potty moth. I insure you there was a sweary in your OP.

Not using obscenities when fitting is reducing the depth of expression. Some things are done suboptimally, some are done badly, and some are utterly fucked.

And replacing obscenities with silly words is just that, silly

> Their are children on this blog.

Putting children on tech blogs is abuse, they might learn something terrible like JS by accident, that's worse than any bad word they could find

It baffles me it's the only comment pointing this out and it's not even at the top.

The rest of commenters for some reason seem to equate "technical debt" with old technology and "legacy" projects.

People just like excuses to rewrite stuff with new fancy toys I guess.

We have code running for 10+ years in our CM. It's not technical debt. It's well tested asset that continually produces value without much problems or maintenance, coz most of them were already rooted out.

Sure if it was 10 years old blob in language nobody writes in in company it would have been potential liability but assuming every piece of software is that because it is old is a problem.

Many managers or higher-up business leaders do not understand the concept of maintenance, which is why it becomes 'technical debt'.

They just expect the existing thing to keep working in the background and more imporantly do the new stuff that is wanted.

It's generally a debt, because engineers are not given time to maintain it properly. Imagine the car never getting to go to a garage to be serviced, because it's needed for driving all the time. There is your debt.