Legacy Code — It’s Everywhere
“Legacy Systems” mean different things to different people, with the variation usually being based on backgrounds 1. Something the previous person wrote : Common in “startup culture”, and typically used for libraries and/or apps that were written by somebody else . A variant of this is when you are the “previous person” — remember, code is either growing or staling. 2. Something that the company used to rely on : Common in “larger” companies or enterprises, and refers to systems/components that were part of a business-line that is just not the focus anymore — and have, consequently, most of their development focused on maintenance. A variation of this theme is when the business-line is so “mature” that the underlying code is a few tech-generations old (“ CORBA ? Good god! ”) 3. Something running on mainframes : This isn’t just a variation of -2-. For a lot of people (especially folks that came from the dawn of the internet age), “legacy” specifically refers to ma...