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Comment by urthen | Hacker News Reader

Cute story, but I detect a certain bitterness and refusal to accept the "future" of software engineering is actually the "now."

People didn't think up microservices yesterday, they aren't some hot new fad that'll be forgotten in a year, and they aren't being developed because people just have nothing better to do. They're replacing legacy systems which nobody wants to touch at a rapid clip. People don't like working on legacy systems because they're at an unfortunate intersection of being business critical yet flaky and hard to work on.

In the context of this story, well... your protagonist is actually on life support. But not to worry! They'll be taken off it soon...

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If anything, it's a pretty pragmatic view about the high frequency with which new systems intended to replace legacy ones fail to do so.

Certainly applications can be supplanted or replaced, and often are, at the discretion of users and customers.

But 'living' (running) systems can often only be successfully replaced in the manner of the Ship of Theseus.

I think you missed the point. Whatever you call your code, monolith or microservice, it's still code and tomorrow or next year it will be legacy code. I'm not sure if the size of the codebase actually matters, developers just want to develop and will move on quickly to the next thing. It takes time and patience and persistence to maintain legacy code and the systems it's embedded in and it's far from sexy or exciting. The young dominate IT and are way more idealistic and filled with enthusiasm and new ideas than those of us who are getting on. They want to make their mark and solve the world's problems and that means more and more code! But new code! This new code will be better, you'll see.

> In the context of this story, well... your protagonist is actually on life support. But not to worry! They'll be taken off it soon...

"Soon" is often...not soon. I have never, ever seen a legacy system of any substantial complexity taken fully offline. Nor have I seen even partial replacements for such a system deliver a reliable alternative anywhere close to on time. In fact, I've seen more half-baked successors be either scrapped or put on life support themselves than I have seen get even into the ballpark of what could generously be considered success.

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