What can we do about legacy?
Legacy modernization has a very high cost tag. In many situations the price of modernization is completely discouraging.
As a thread of discussion on Twitter, @tk300 suggests a disciplined attitude to limit the problem:
.@JBezivin Have as little code as possible, in as few mainstream technologies as possible. That's how you limit, not prevent, legacy.—
Tobias Kuipers (@tk300) November 23, 2010
But this applies only to new legacy, not the one that has already been produced in RPG,COBOL, ADA, PL/1, HTML or even Java?
And even if we decide to follow this advice, this probably means that we should also stop innovation?
May be we could think of new techniques that will produce software easy to evolve or to recycle?
