I like all the points you put up. We suffer legacy the moment we buy something today, the speed of updates, new technologies force us to keep updating. That is certainly not good. I love the dinosaur remark- so many of them living in the 20th century.

The human factor of putting a break on it all can happen, in some ways I would encourage it.

As for building fortunes or careers, yes the “hype” runs so far ahead it becomes laughable at times. As for reaching back to people that remember just mention ERP to many veterans and watch the blood drain from their faces.

All said, it still not takes away from thinknig about solutions to legacy as they do hamper options for the future

I’m not just talking here about companies getting themselves out of some problem or other by calling back some retired developers who can still remember FORTRAN or PL/1; but also the wider depth of knowledge that a lot of people got over picking up issues or enhancements to legacy systems. We aren’t all always building the new; sometimes, we get asked to help maintain or upgrade the old. That puts some of us in a good position to apply the lessons learned in those exercises to other situations. It also makes us enthusiastic for projects that supersede legacy systems when they finally get replaced – though we will have some realistic ideas about the possible pitfalls along the way.

And that experience will stand our younger colleagues in good stead after we have passed on our knowledge and experience when they, in turn, get asked to maintain the legacy systems of tomorrow!

Firstly: you do realise that the cutting edge, bold new world of IoT, data mining and all the other breathtaking new innovations you write about will be tomorrow’s legacy apps? Corporate inertia, external economic conditions, or just even the shock of the new will make some organisations and companies shy away from adopting today’s new ideas, or next week’s, or next year’s. Today’s innovators may turn out to be tomorrow’s dinosaurs, and we won’t be able to sort one from the other until we have some hindsight over who has been left behind by what new development, and who this affects.

And external factors, human factors, may put a brake on the rapid spread of new technologies. Data mining from social media platforms is suddenly becoming a serious political issue; and in a battle between a technocratic drive ever onwards into the future and public inertia because this or that bad thing happened, the public will win – partly because they can vote with their feet and their wallets, and partly because politicians are always going to be open to opportunities to leverage that pressure.

My second point is slightly less serious (in a way). There are a lot of people in the IT industry who built their entire knowledge base on dealing with legacy applications. I’m not just talking here about companies getting themselves out of some problem or other by calling back some retired developers who can still remember