Technical debt - was Re: datetime seems to be broken WRT timezones (even when you add them)

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 11:48 AM Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/11/20 5:37 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 11:32 AM Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 2/11/20 2:25 PM, Barry Scott wrote:
> >>> At Chris said moving to python3 will *reduce* your technical debt.
> >>> You are paying off the debt.
> >>
> >> While at the same time incurring new debt.
> >
> > That's not an intrinsic part of the rewrite, and will only happen if
> > you do the job sloppily.
> >
> > Perhaps you're completely misunderstanding the meaning of the term?
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt
> > https://thedailywtf.com/articles/technical-debt
>
> Yes I understand the meaning.  Getting code out the door now, at the
> expense of maintenance later.  But really all code is technical debt.
> That's my main point.  No one writes good enough code to be completely
> free of this technical debt.

But you CAN rewrite code such that it reduces technical debt. You can
refactor code to make it more logical. You can update things to use
idioms that better express the concepts you're trying to represent
(maybe because those idioms require syntactic features that didn't
exist, or simply because you didn't know about them when you first
wrote the code). Maybe you'll still have SOME debt, but that doesn't
mean it's never reduced.

Debt is not a binary state.

ChrisA