“Should I Recode?”
A piece of spam comment made me think about this, recently. The spam was along the lines of “My developer wants me to switch from .NET to PHP but….” I deleted it at that point, but it made me think about my father. My father wrote some software called Riskman, which is still being used today. And it’s written in Visual Basic.
I don’t know how familiar you are with that, but Visual Basic was written in 1991, around the time my younger brother was born. Sometime around the mid 90s, Dad took Riskman (DOS) and made it VB’d. I remember this as I was in high school and my father explained some of the theory of programing to me (the basic math part at least), and is part of why I took some computer classes in college.
But that was over twenty years ago, and VB 6 (the last version) was written in 1995.
“You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby”
When I was growing up, my grandmother Taffy ran her own business, and in the front office she had posters of the old Virginia Slims ads. I never asked her why. Among the many things Taffy did, however, she had a computer system at her company. This was crazy rare and crazy expensive at the time. In fact, it was so weird that when they went to get a loan for the computer server room, the bank asked “IBM who?”
But they persevered, got the money and the servers, and kept going until the early 1990s, when Taffy sold the company to Capezio, computers and all. In between, they had direct dial-up on Novatel phones, which I quickly mastered at a young age, in order than I could handle data entry and Taffy could make me breakfast. Taffy changed with the times. She moved forward as it was needed, and was ahead of the curve in some things.
The Only Constant is Change
If you didn’t see Jen Mylo’s keynote speech at WordCamp Portland, check it out.
Websites change. Design styles change. What’s ‘cool’ changes. The logical extension? Code changes.
It’s nearly 2014 and my father is still coding in VB 6. I had to help scrounge him up a copy of it with a license when he had to reinstall it on his new laptop. It was monumental. At the time, I asked him why he didn’t upgrade to .NET and he replied that he’d have to recode everything. This means mastering a new programing style and possibly language. My father’s in his 60s and he’s gotten a little curmudgeony about this stuff.
But at the same time I pointed out a horrible fact. One day Microsoft was going to release an operating system that didn’t work with old VB apps. Sure, an executable is an executable, but one day that old EXE won’t work right. Worse, you look like you’re not keeping up with the times, that you’re not adapting to the changing landscape, and for a risk analytics programmer, this may be critical.
Code Changes
Perhaps ironically, Dad asked me about what he’d have to do to make his app work on an iPad, and we discussed data storage, the cloud, and how to keep data in sync between devices. I showed him Byword, which stores my data and downloads it locally when I need it to. He started to look to the future of how people will use his program. They’re not just sitting in cubicles anymore, they’re in the field wanting to update stats on the fly and be able to communicate, then and there, the risks.
He knows coding it all up for iOS is monumental. Unlike .NET, there’s no vaguely similar comfort level to the new language. This is a massive undertaking, and it brings up the question of if he should learn it, hire an expert, or get a new partner. For 20 years, this has been a one-man shop with the code, and bringing in someone new is a major undertaking.
My first ‘big’ WordPress plugin sucks. I love Disabler, but I want to sit and recode it with classes and singletons and using the options table properly. It’s a massive undertaking, and I’ve been putting it off for a long time. No reason other than it’s hard. If more people used the plugin, I’d probably do it now because there would be a driving need. In that way, I’m like my Dad. I don’t want to learn all the things I need to do what I’d have to do to fix it, and it’s not broken so why bother? And like my Dad, I do consider the future, where it will take me, and what that all implies.
Should you change your code?
Changing your code to improve it to meet the current standards is not a requirement for all of us. As an idealistic goal, yes, we should all strive for it, but realistically we are a limited resource. Should you totally change all your code from VB 6 to .NET? One day, maybe, if that’s where your clientele go, yes. At the same time, even if you choose not to change your code, you should keep an open mind. The future comes at you pretty damn fast, and sticking your head in the sand just because it works today will end badly.
You should change. You should grow, change, learn, expand, and improve. As we like to say here in Open Source “Release and iterate.” Don’t settle, but also don’t change needlessly.
The best changes are the ones you don’t notice because they feel like they’ve been there all along.
