> All of the talk about how old and bad the language is, and how nobody wants to learn it is tech speak for, "We can't support it as is, we need a rewrite!" Anyone who has been near tech for a long time knows "rewrite" means "tech is going to break it for unclear reasons and uncertain gain, and in a few years will want to rewrite it again. Tech people always underestimate the cost and risk of a rewrite, and also overestimate the benefits.
No, it really isn't. I'm happy to learn a new language. The reason is correctly stated by a sibling post here (WesolyKubeczek).
That we've been able to containerise it has limited a lot of the risk, and any upstream issues we have going forward we should be able to write some middleware to sit between it and transform the data into the format we need. We can extend the container to proxy any requests from the ancient application to the new middleware. We have a strategy, the product owner is happy with that, but we've outlined that maybe the solution won't work as we think, there are always unknown unknowns...
The issue is that if a problem does arise, it will be immediate and the effects will be there for as long as it takes to get a fix up and running, which could be weeks to who knows how long. That's a real risk in my eyes, but it wasn't to our product owner.
It will affect a lot of people, it's a pretty widely used service! It's entertainment, so people won't die if it fails.
The risk was deemed low enough by the product owner that we can just leave it in a container until it's finally sunsetted in 5-10 years (or so...). We've had 2 product owners since the OG product owner made that decision, so it could just be the product owner who made the decision thought they'd be long gone by the time it became an issue.
You're making assumptions about people you've never met, you don't know me and you don't know what motivates me.
You aren't as good at "reading between the lines" as you think you are.
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From your profile: My main programming language is Perl
Oh, it all makes sense, you're hurt that I called Perl 5 old! That's funny. I've never written production Perl, I am not making a judgement on the language.
No, it really isn't. I'm happy to learn a new language. The reason is correctly stated by a sibling post here (WesolyKubeczek).
That we've been able to containerise it has limited a lot of the risk, and any upstream issues we have going forward we should be able to write some middleware to sit between it and transform the data into the format we need. We can extend the container to proxy any requests from the ancient application to the new middleware. We have a strategy, the product owner is happy with that, but we've outlined that maybe the solution won't work as we think, there are always unknown unknowns...
The issue is that if a problem does arise, it will be immediate and the effects will be there for as long as it takes to get a fix up and running, which could be weeks to who knows how long. That's a real risk in my eyes, but it wasn't to our product owner.
It will affect a lot of people, it's a pretty widely used service! It's entertainment, so people won't die if it fails.
The risk was deemed low enough by the product owner that we can just leave it in a container until it's finally sunsetted in 5-10 years (or so...). We've had 2 product owners since the OG product owner made that decision, so it could just be the product owner who made the decision thought they'd be long gone by the time it became an issue.
You're making assumptions about people you've never met, you don't know me and you don't know what motivates me.
You aren't as good at "reading between the lines" as you think you are.
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From your profile: My main programming language is Perl
Oh, it all makes sense, you're hurt that I called Perl 5 old! That's funny. I've never written production Perl, I am not making a judgement on the language.