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So the software lifecycle ends up with a sort of Zeno's paradox, each incremental maintainer understands the system less...fascinating, ty!



I believe pretty much anyone who has observed a few cycles can tell as much.

Often the major trigger for a rewrite is that the knowledge has mostly left the building.

But then there's the cognitive dissonance; because the we like pretending that the system is the knowledge and thus has economic value in itself, and that people are interchangeable. None of which is true.


On sufficiently large and old code bases, yes, this is exactly the case.




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