Legacy Code Quotes

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code.

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

I am greatly proud of the fact that 'Doom' is one of those things where everything that has a 32-bit processor has had 'Doom' run on it, and I think that's been one of the great aspects of having it be open source: having everything out there means that people have maintained that and kept it up to date.

For all that Tron wanted to be, it ultimately had to be a fun ride for the audience and I was going to be one of the comic characters, and he was really on top of that. He was having such a good time doing it. That's my memory of it. I'd love to work with him again. I think he's great.

Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'.