What’s the difference between legacy code and technical debt? Serious question. If you have one you always have the other?
16% Yeah they’re the same.
62% No (explain in replies)
5% WTF (complain in replies)
17% 🐧
173 votes • Final results
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Or current code - i.e., the kind you write to meet the sprint deadline that just barely works, but Monday we're onto a different feature
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Replying to @TroyWarr @mediajunkie @noahsussman
How true! So it kind of means that legacy is actually up to last hour of committed code... Maybe it's our perception of time that's the problem.

Mar 17, 2022 · 9:08 PM UTC

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Replying to @mholzschlag @mediajunkie @noahsussman
Haha. It is definitely tricky to define "legacy" & I think it's often in the eye of the beholder. I don't think the age of the codebase is always a factor - really simple/stable code can live decades. I'd say maybe "code that we'd prefer to rewrite/refactor if we had the time"
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Would that everyone thought more carefully (or knew how to) about our code, potential longevity, of course the commenting and cleanup of hacks and old bugs as you mentioned and knew what risks legacy issues can cause! It's at subject for at least a book, a talk, and courseware!
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Was it? Computer programming typically required far more rigor than we see in the web industry for good reason - at least theoretically. Look at what happened to draconian error handling in XML. How many learn JavaScript as a language? Or for that matter even HTML, CSS? 😑
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