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Sure, but you're acting under the premise that "if we just did it 'right' the first time, we wouldn't have this mess". What I'm saying is that only under very few circumstances does it ever workout that way. Particularly with long standing systems and their software. It just builds over years, nothing you can really do about it.

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> Sure, but you're acting under the premise that "if we just did it 'right' the first time, we wouldn't have this mess".

I think you're right that every long-lived code base will have warts. And I don't think that means that the original builders were wrong-headed.

But if you've got a decades-old system that nobody understands anymore, you've got a huge liability. You can't ship features to compete, you can't fix bugs, you can't comply with new regulations. You can't even rewrite confidently because you don't know what the old system does.

There must be things you can do as a code base ages to keep it maintainable, allow incremental rewrites, etc.

You may not want to reinvent the wheel, but you have to change the tires.

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