New things come along, developers get excited, proclaim we finally have the ultimate language, framework, tool, architecture. Rinse, repeat. All of the code developed in last week’s or last year’s big thing is still out there, now dismissed as legacy, full of technical debt. Programming is like fashion that way.
Lots of decades-old COBOL code still runs enterprise businesses. Something like 75% of all public web sites were written in PHP, dismissed as obsolete for years. So in a sense everything developers use at all is here to stay for a long while, because the cost and risk of replacing it every few months is too high, and programmers hate maintaining legacy code.
After enough time in the development business you figure out that we mostly reinvent the same flat tire over and over.
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New things come along, developers get excited, proclaim we finally have the ultimate language, framework, tool, architecture. Rinse, repeat. All of the code developed in last week’s or last year’s big thing is still out there, now dismissed as legacy, full of technical debt. Programming is like fashion that way.
Lots of decades-old COBOL code still runs enterprise businesses. Something like 75% of all public web sites were written in PHP, dismissed as obsolete for years. So in a sense everything developers use at all is here to stay for a long while, because the cost and risk of replacing it every few months is too high, and programmers hate maintaining legacy code.
After enough time in the development business you figure out that we mostly reinvent the same flat tire over and over.
Truth