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Comment by mattmanser

2 days ago

Yeah, I always raise an eyebrow at attitudes like that too.

I've also reimplemented or gradually replaced several out-of-date systems. Albeit on a smaller scale.

In my experience, when you start picking the programs apart you find 90% of the code is redundant or boilerplate. Much of it isn't even called from anywhere, abandoned code, and can be deleted en masse. A lot of programmers don't clean code up "just in case" and then no-one else deletes it.

They can also often be vastly simplified because programmers back then didn't have the patterns and knowledge to write consisely.

I often find myself simplifying the original code first, which gets rid of 50% of it. Then I can see what the code actually does and rewrite it which gets rid of the other 40%.

On the other hand, many programmers don't have the patience, stubbornness or skill to do this kind of work.

And the ability to get through the major panic you have when you're half way through and wondering if you were mad to even start.

> And the ability to get through the major panic you have when you're half way through and wondering if you were mad to even start.

I feel seen, thank you.