[citrin_ru]

> the 'legacy' code has way more knowledge embedded in it than it might seem.

Cannot agree more, but when knowledge embedded only in the code and not in comments/commits and documentation it is a problem even if you don't plan for re-write.

It is very disappointing to hear from otherwise good programmers statements like: "good code doesn't need comments (and my code is good)". As a result we have code where some line can captures hours of research and/or discussions, but there are no comments and commit logs are too brief. After a year even an author usually cannot say why it was done this way.