Comment by james_marks
7 hours ago
If it’s survived this long, it likely because it has years of small fixes to make it reliable and useful, and more than anything—- predictable for the user.
Modernizing will roll some of that back; I would only consider it if there’s a plan to be around for the years it will take to get good again.
Eh, I bet a lot of this stuff is running on some old SCO box held together with ducttape and prayers, because the vendor is long gone/dead.
People who are good programmers say this, they have this fantasy, but it's a myth. The opposite is of course true, because there is no maintenance, there are a bajillion agonizing bugs and people simply work around them, the "small fixes" live inside the heads of the people using the application.
Like the fantasy is that the bank uses TUIs and the bank has accumulated years of knowledge and the bank doesn't make mistakes. The bank has extremely well paid staff. Joe Shmoe's TUI app looks like the bank's app, but it is unmaintained, it has accumulated years of problems, not fixes, nobody is fixing them, people who say they fix them cannot possibly be keeping up with the sheer amount of toil and bugs needed for production software. You can see this in any GitHub project, how much insane maintenance is required, for stuff people actually use and has few bugs.