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Have you ever done something that seemed like a good idea at the time? Then looked back upon it much later and had second and third thoughts about the wisdom of what you had done?
A long time ago, Jack worked for a company that had built a goods-declarations system for freight-forwarders so that they could get the blessing of the government to import/export their goods.
Arty works on a team maintaining a legacy application that can best be described as a birds nest of code. It is a massive collection of global variables and a few tens of thousands of routines that would independently modify the data. Decapsulation was the overriding design pattern of choice. Of course, changing the value of some variable invariably has all sorts of unpredictable side affects. Naturally, this lead management to be fearful of making any changes, no matter how urgent, for fear of what would inevitably happen.
Fortunately, management recognized the need to replace it. The directive was given. A new application would be built. The replacement would be designed in such a way as to keep data and the routines that needed to access it somehow tied together. The state of a variable would only be changed as an end-result of some business action.
Nov 14