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This
post about the July 8 glitches (United, NYSE, WSJ failed) keeps popping up in my Twitter timeline. It's complete nonsense.
What's being argued here is that these glitches were due to some sort of "moral weakness", like laziness, politics, or stupidity. It's a facile and appealing argument, so scoundrels make it often -- to great applause from the audience. But it's not true.
Legacy
Layers and legacies exist because working systems are precious. More than half of big software projects are abandoned, because getting new things to work is a hard task. We place so much value on legacy, working old systems, because the new replacements usually fail.
An example of this is the failed BIND10 project. BIND, the
Berkeley Internet Name Daemon, is the oldest and most popular DNS server. It is the
de facto reference standard for how DNS works, more so than the actual RFCs. Version 9 of the project is 15 years old. Therefore, the consortium that maintains it funded development for version 10. They completed the project, then effectively abandoned it, as it was worse in almost every way than the previous version.
The reason legacy works well is the enormous
regression testing Continue reading