I also find amusing that “legacy” more often than not gets used in negative cono...

tpoacher · 2025-01-07T22:43:36 1736289816

There's a good chance that's not what people mean by this term though.

It's probably used in the (now) classic sense as defined by M. Feathers in his "Working with legacy code" book.

Code that is old but otherwise awesome, maintainable (or even actively maintained) and easy / a joy to work with are rarely referred to as "legacy code".

jimbokun · 2025-01-08T02:14:06 1736302446

It doesn’t seem awesome at first glance because it takes longer to get up to speed on a large, old code base than a small, young one.

But you will quickly learn how awesome the old code base is if you attempt to rewrite it, and realize everything the old code base takes into account.

bdangubic · 2025-01-07T23:44:37 1736293477

hmmm almost 3 decades in the industry and have very seldom (some exceptions) heard “legacy” for code that is old but awesome.

forty · 2025-01-07T23:08:40 1736291320

Measuring value by what stays the longer is tempting, but sometimes it's just that the mess is such that no one can touch it :)

bdangubic · 2025-01-07T23:39:36 1736293176

100% but mess or not - it works - otherwise you’d have no option but to touch it

galimaufry · 2025-01-08T01:15:07 1736298907

Sometimes it doesn't work and no one can tell.

forty · 2025-01-09T07:43:04 1736408584

Sometimes it doesn't work, but fixing the mess is too expensive and we don't have time

bdangubic · 2025-01-08T02:57:29 1736305049

how can that be possible?

jsrcout · 2025-01-08T02:30:34 1736303434

In my experience people use it to mean "old crap that we can't get rid of (yet)".