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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

I really liked this: "as a general rule, large established codebases produce 90% of the value."

People see the ugliness -- because solving real problems, especially if business practices are involved, is often very messy -- but that's where the value is.

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I also find amusing that “legacy” more often than not gets used in negative conotation. I hear “legacy” and I think “bunch of people wrote some AWESOME shit that lasted so long that now other people get to view it as ‘legacy’”

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".

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

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.

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 :)

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

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

how can that be possible?

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

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

Earning code trumps pretty code every time.

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