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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s an old Silicon Valley truism that rewriting or refactoring code is a trap.

You imagine clean lines of concise engineered code much easier to read and maintain.

But don’t realize that that extra bobs and bits were edge cases the idealized algorithm can’t handle, or real world limitations of hardware or meatspace, and have rolled back stability to V1.0 BETA.

Facebook still runs PHP. It’s also why banks have old mainframes.  Replacing a complex, public safety system in real time while in use?

I’m getting a Winnebago. [/quote]
I am by no means an IT expert but I have done programming in the past (mostly math related stuff including a dive into R) and I have done bits of coding (like custom functions in google sheets). I also worked in an IT support role and came to realize that all these coders out there (our different contractor units)  dealt with small pieces of much bigger platforms and problems would come up when someone's external bot didn't understand the environment it was doing things in--I had this poor guy who was stuck manually rerouting major alerts for servers for a power generation company to another team more than 100 times a day. This had gone on for months and every so often he would put in a ticket for the problem and it would just die somewhere. The team responsible for the bot said plaintively that they didn't know what the other system needed. I ended up having to track down upper level managers who had the ability to get midlevel people for the different teams to talk to each other, although I got moved out of that unit before ever finding out if the guy's problem ever got fixed. And I was literally bottom tier tech support.

My grasp on the idea of object-orienting programming is that this is what enabled different platforms to talk to each other, but the downside is nobody knows how anything works from the ground up. I suspect coders are more or less like repair technicians who pull out a module and stick in another module but if there is a more subtle problem going on they have no ability to figure it out. [/quote]

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