[spc476]

I've been using a program I wrote for 18 years now. The code today is not the same as the code 18 years back. I have slowly modified the code as ideas for new features come up, old features removed because they aren't used anymore, and foundational code rewritten as I found better implementations (or the previous implementation was a mistake [1][2]. Making a sweeping change (like re-implementing some core code) is dangerous because of the threat of new bugs, which is why tests are important (although I tent to prefer integration tests over unit tests).

[1] I used to have an error logging mechanism in place that would record where in the code the error happened (in addition to other information) and how it propagated up through the code.

While it wasn't that hard to use, per se, it was bothersome when I had to add an error (each error had a unique ID and because of language issues and tooling, that was a manual process). And it really never paid back its implementation cost in terms of reporting, so I finally ripped it out.

[2] I had my own version of C's FILE* [3] that ended up being a horrible abstraction---it was so confusing that I could never remember how to use it, and I wrote the code. I got fed up with it, and ripped that out, replacing it with native IO calls.

[3] For stupid reasons now that I think back on it.