Legacy
A legacy is the part of the dead that remains influential.
A life that leaves a legacy has been a good one. Not so for software. We use the polite term “legacy” for code that has lost all sense of vitality even though it might run every day and exert the unchanging influence of past decisions on all who for whatever reason are unable to walk away.
We distinguish software from hardware. We call hardware hard because we think of it as fixed, unlikely to change without screwdriver in hand. We call software soft because it is made up of ideas, expressed as code, loaded into hardware to make something useful.
The irony of our industry is that code turns out to be “harder” than hardware when it is thought to be finished and the developers dismissed. ...
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