Having fun with legacy code
Additionally to the development of new, modern software, the support
of legacy code remains an important problem in the astronomical
community. Data reduction and analysis pipelines may depend on old
software tools, without strong motivation and funding to break this
dependency. Also, despite of strong efforts, modern software tools
still may miss some features that are provided by old software. On the
other hand, legacy software often lacks institutional support and also
does not follow current software development principles.
I will discuss the motivation and experiences for the support of
legacy software, and the specific challenges for IRAF maintainance as
an example.