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The big exception to this I've seen: The functioning bit of software was written in an oddball language that was already niche decades ago and the pool of devel
by wl 3mo ago
The big exception to this I've seen: The functioning bit of software was written in an oddball language that was already niche decades ago and the pool of developers who are competent to work on such a codebase is exceedingly small.
- darth_avocado 3mo agoI would classify them in the “ existing languages/frameworks getting obsolete” bucket.
- jamesfinlayson 3mo agoYep - I was at a company that replaced something super obscure - I suspect the number of people in Australia that knew the tech was like 10 to 20. The tech was so obscure I don't think there was any path out other than a full rewrite. A company I worked at decided to rewrite a Fortran system - I suspect that if they wanted to avoid a rewrite they could have started breaking bits off into C and mixing the languages at the linking step... but I understand their desire for a clean break - a rewrite was going to take years but a migration would have taken even longer and been even harder due to the lack of Fortran developers.