evaluation question

[rbowman]

On Thu, 2 Feb 2023 16:09:09 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:


> What if its not a few scripts? What if its 10s of thousands of lines of
> core production code? If the company it belongs to wants to add new
> Python 3 features it can't just plug them into the code because it won't
> run under Python 3, they have to do a full overhaul or even complete
> rewrite and that costs a lot of time and money.

Tell me about it...  Esri is the 500 pound gorilla in the GIS industry. 
They haven't been secretive about their roadmap but the tools people have 
been using for almost 20 years are going, going, GONE. 

Part of that is their scripting language ArcPy moved to 3.8. It's a minor 
inconvenience for me to update some old scripts and to develop with 3 but 
a lot of firms have those thousands of lines of code they've developed 
over the years in ArcPy for GIS data manipulation.

More painful for me is the C++ API is also gone. Legacy sites have a 
couple of more years before it's all over. That leaves me with a foot in 
both worlds. 

> Unfortunately a lot of people who've never worked in large institutions
> with huge code bases don't understand this.

I don't work in a large company but I deal with about 25 years of legacy 
code every day. The core functionality is good but the time and money is 
spent putting lipstick on a pig. 

Technical debt is an industry wide problem.