Time Refines Code
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This post is more than 10 years old. I do not delete posts, because even old information is still useful, but please know that some material on this page may be outdated or incorrect. Thanks!
This post is more than 10 years old. I do not delete posts, because even old information is still useful, but please know that some material on this page may be outdated or incorrect. Thanks!
Legacy code—warts and all—isn't such a bad thing.
If it's built well, and maintained well, it probably takes care of the hundreds/thousands of edge cases with which your beautifully-rewritten new codebase doesn't yet cope.
Unless it's not well-documented (or self-documented), or incompatible with modern systems, it's often a better idea to refactor and clean up old code than to scrap a system entirely and rewrite from scratch.
Image from Thinking Through.
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