Post B2BIApLL8FEkey2eDA by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
 (DIR) More posts by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
 (DIR) Post #B2BIAQbR7GG3veNeKW by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
       2026-01-11T13:52:36Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       “Code is not an infinitely reproducible machine that requires no labor inputs to operate. Rather, it is a brittle machine that requires increasingly heroic measures to keep it in good working order, and which eventually does "wear out" (in the sense of needing a top-to-bottom refactoring).”— @pluralistic, https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modesThe myth that "old code doesn't rust" persists because it justifies moving fast, breaking things, and leaving it for  someone else to clean up the mess.👇🏽
       
 (DIR) Post #B2BIAZVO17lZXUcReK by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
       2026-01-11T14:57:21Z
       
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       Speaking of the fragility of enterprise software… Here's the robust architecture of an online banking system I used to lead. 3.5 million people trusted this with their life savings.That TUI app written in MUMPS(!) once powered the terminal a bank teller would use to process an in-person transaction. It embodies and unambiguously encodes every business rule for transactions that have been developed over decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS@pluralistic👇🏽
       
 (DIR) Post #B2BIAhwGf41RhBG1ey by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
       2026-01-11T15:17:20Z
       
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       @pluralistic That bank licensed the MUMPS source code from its vendor and employed a small team that did nothing except keep that MUMPS app alive. Nobody else could touch that code for many reasons, one of which was security.  The closest I came was updating the JDBC code in concert with changes the team would make to the app.This is a single—but compelling—example of, “Increasingly heroic measures to keep legacy software in good working order.”👇🏽
       
 (DIR) Post #B2BIApLL8FEkey2eDA by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
       2026-01-11T15:25:15Z
       
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       Legacy software has many weird things within it that cause it to require increasing amounts of copium to manage. Here's a trivial example from that same code base.The Oracle database had a column for customer zip codes. Just for fun, what was it called?