Re:Technical debt and tacking into the wind
by peteretep on Thursday June 25, 2015 @09:53PM
(#9782077)
> I don't think I know anybody personally, whose response
> would be, "I know, let's write a compiler to translate
> our VBScript into something that runs on Unix."
That's not how these things happen in the real world, though.
They happen when somebody says "You know, VBScript looks a lot like PHP. I wonder how much of our code would run with some simple regexes transforms" and gets 40% of the codebase "compiling" with some helper functions. And then someone realizes that regexes don't quite cut it, and actually look here's this VBScript grammar I found online, and it's only two days work to convert the AST to PHP, and 80% of the codebase compiles... And a little while later, you realize that you have a commercially viable alternative to a Big Bang Rewrite.
They happen when somebody says "You know, VBScript looks a lot like PHP. I wonder how much of our code would run with some simple regexes transforms" and gets 40% of the codebase "compiling" with some helper functions. And then someone realizes that regexes don't quite cut it, and actually look here's this VBScript grammar I found online, and it's only two days work to convert the AST to PHP, and 80% of the codebase compiles... And a little while later, you realize that you have a commercially viable alternative to a Big Bang Rewrite.