Why is “Legacy” a negative word?

Programming might be the only place where “legacy” is a negative word. It seems backwards that we’re an industry where things tend to get worse instead of better as they get older and more people work on them. How does that happen?

Imagine you’re given a task to make a change to a piece of code that works, but no one wants to touch. It’s a gnarly mess of quick fixes and rushed, untested features that’s impossible to understand.

But you’re relieved because the change you need to make is super tiny. You can dive in, add a new if block to the 500-line method and get outta there.

“Who made that mess? I wish my managers would give me time to rewrite this thing” you think as you wash your hands of that “legacy code”.

But how did the code get like that? No one sets out to write a giant, confusing method that no one wants to work in. It’s a group effort. It takes lots of little “quick fixes” and “tiny changes” like the one you just made.

It’s not up to your managers to “let” you pay down that “technical debt”. A rewrite won’t fix that problem. To really fix it, we need to change our attitude about code like this.

We need to realize that the problem isn’t some other programmer who wrote this big thing. It’s us. We all worked together to make this mess because no one thinks their one small change is causing the problem.

When we finish working on a piece of the system, it shouldn’t just do what we want, it should also be a little bit easier for the next person to come in and make more changes. Our job isn’t just to build new things, it’s to enable change. To do that, we should leave each piece of code we touch a little better than we found it.

This is sometimes called The Boy Scout Rule. Martin Fowler calls it Opportunistic Refactoring.

Imagine working on a team where this is the norm. Imagine working on a code base that gets better as it ages. Imagine if “legacy” was a good thing.

That doesn’t mean there will never be a mess. But it means the trend will be towards cleaner code. Quick hacks and technical debt will no longer be excuses to continue cutting corners. They will be strategic decisions made when the trade-off is worth it. And we don’t need to get management approval to pay down that debt, because it won’t be a huge undertaking. It will be how we normally work: pay it down a little bit at a time as we continue working on the codebase.

Let’s start leaving behind a good legacy.