Hacker News with Generative AI: Legacy Code

Porting COBOL Code and the Trouble with Ditching Domain Specific Languages (hackaday.com)
Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in an ‘antiquated’ programming language like Fortran or COBOL, very few people tend to object to this notion.
Programming Languages, Software Development, Legacy Code, COBOL
5 points by jnord 10 days ago | 1 comments
Show HN: AI-Powered Documentation Generator for Legacy Codebases (github.com/jonverrier)
McpDoc is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server implementation designed to generate documentation for existing systems. It provides a set of MCP prompts and tools for generating code summaries and C4 architecture diagrams using Mermaid.js.
AI, Documentation, Legacy Code, Code Generation, Tools
8 points by Jonverrier 38 days ago | 2 comments
You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023) (infobip.com)
Everybody hates working on legacy projects, myself included. As fate would have it, one landed in my lap recently. While working on it didn’t make me hate legacy projects any less, it did help me get a deeper understanding of the processes and practices we use today.
Software Engineering, Legacy Code, Software Development, Experience
783 points by tonkkatonka 71 days ago | 412 comments
Haunted Graveyards in Consulting (datosh.github.io)
Popularized by Google[1][2], Haunted Graveyards are pieces of code that, while providing a business value, are so ancient, obtuse, or complex that no one dares enter them.
Software Development, Consulting, Legacy Code
15 points by datosh 143 days ago | 13 comments
The tragedy of running an old Node project (abdisalan.com)
It’s been a long while since I wrote anything on this site. The framework I used was Gatsby which in 2020 was one of the hot ways of getting a good looking blog up and running quickly. With over 41 dependencies, and god knows how many more sub-dependencies, this thing was a beast.
JavaScript, Node.js, Web Development, Software Development, Legacy Code
272 points by abdisalan 159 days ago | 403 comments
Ask HN: Junior dev in charge of rewriting 500k line PHP app. Looking for advice (ycombinator.com)
We are a 4 person company, that makes a web app I'll call Star. Today, Star is 11 years old and showing its age. It was developed entirely by one of the founders, who has no formal training, and the niche industry we serve has changed greatly in the last decade, rendering many of our core abstractions obsolete. In theory, Star follows MVC, but in practice there is no coherent architecture.
Software Development, PHP, Web Development, Legacy Code, Startups
13 points by poncho_romero 166 days ago | 25 comments
Suite smells: testing legacy code (bitfieldconsulting.com)
A friend had just started a consulting gig with a new team, so I asked him, “How are they doing?” He said, “They’re writing legacy code, man.” —Michael Feathers, “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”
Software Development, Legacy Code, Testing
26 points by gus_leonel 180 days ago | 10 comments
NTS (TeX reimplementation in Java from 2001) still compiles under Java 16 (github.com/jamespfennell)
Programming, Software, Java, Legacy Code, Open Source
68 points by wolfi1 309 days ago | 63 comments