Truly spoken as someone who has never worked with legacy code. You know, the kind that's still running Java 1.something when Java was already doing full numbered releases.
The kind that works, but everyone who knows why has left the company. The whole codebase is written in a way that makes automated testing either impossible or so time-consuming that the client will never pay for the required refactoring.
There is way too much code in the world we never were able to rewrite due to real-world concerns. There were people who had the skill, but a part of that skill came with knowing the risks of doing major refactoring to a money-generating system that is ancient, but still works.
Anecdote: I had to work with a system where the original coder (long gone) had rewritten Linked Lists with their custom solution that worked normally except the first X items were the sum, average and mean of the data. Fun times.
The kind that works, but everyone who knows why has left the company. The whole codebase is written in a way that makes automated testing either impossible or so time-consuming that the client will never pay for the required refactoring.
There is way too much code in the world we never were able to rewrite due to real-world concerns. There were people who had the skill, but a part of that skill came with knowing the risks of doing major refactoring to a money-generating system that is ancient, but still works.
Anecdote: I had to work with a system where the original coder (long gone) had rewritten Linked Lists with their custom solution that worked normally except the first X items were the sum, average and mean of the data. Fun times.