Legacy tech

[wallymathieu]

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-microsoft-dev-box-preview/

Probably in order to scratch the itch of companies that need specialised snow flakes. Some companies might use self hosted developer machines (in their own closet) due to the cost of VM in the cloud. Many people I've spoken to over the years have wanted to move away from using their own server room for many things.

End of life

• .net framework is becoming .net, and some of the old asp.net apps needs to be converted and are not compatible with the new
• "asp" and vb is becoming hard to maintain partly because the developer tools are becoming harder to get hold of. We might see similar situation for .net framework in the future. Some companies will probably continue maintaining software that cannot easily be replaced past support deadlines.
• Flash
• Variants of different programming languages : Python 1, Python 2
• OS/2
• Silverlight

I did some python scripts around 2004-2005. Some of these stopped working around 2-3 years later because they were not compatible with the libraries anymore.
At one company we started developing .net core 1 applications and had to migrate project systems a couple of times. How you wire up .net core web api applications has changed and sometimes requires careful migration.

Still around but less influence

• Seems like Perl is still around and developed, but might not have the same community around it
• COBOL is used but not as widely as before. Ask your older coworkers, some might tell stories about using it.
• Ruby is still around but has lost a lot of hype and influence, still developed
• Pascal was big for a while but has lost a lot of influence
• ColdFusion

Virtual environment

• In order to develop or modify asp or vb programs you might need special versions of windows.
• In order to develop or modify assembly for a specific processor architecture

dev box not really for legacy tech

It seems that dev box is more oriented in providing a nice environment for development connected to Azure with potential Azure resources connected to those development environments. For legacy development you can still host VM on AWS or Azure and have them shut down when not in use. Question is around the problem of keeping old versions of operating systems that are no longer patched for security updates. You would need to isolate those and restrict access in a manner so that there is very little chance of infection.

[wallymathieu]

We then get into, what is legacy tech.

• https://john-millikin.com/sre-school/no-haunted-forests : loss of understanding, loss of control, loss of confidence

• https://ayende.com/blog/201377-A/does-code-rot-over-time : frameworks, apis have moved on, OS has moved on

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_system : legacy code

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_a_distance_(computer_programming)

• code that developers are afraid to change

• code without tests

[wallymathieu]

There is this link list:
https://github.com/feststelltaste/awesome-legacy-systems?tab=readme-ov-file

[wallymathieu]

https://shiftmag.dev/technical-debt-business-problem-183/

[wallymathieu]

https://okigiveup.net/blog/lessons-from-legacy/

[wallymathieu]

https://ayende.com/blog/201537-A/legacy-code-with-really-good-tests-is-still-legacy-code

[wallymathieu]

https://jimmyhmiller.github.io/not-another-technical-debt-article

Assertion that there are only the following articles around tech debt:

• Taxonomies of Technical Debt
• Redefinitions of Technical Debt
• Technical Debt is (Good|Bad)