[randcraw]

Nobody looks at a house and asks, "What kind of hammer and nails did they use?"

The OP is right: the interesting stuff in computing has always been what a new app/tool/library can DO, how it's being USED, but never HOW it was made.

This revelation first came home for me when the team of contractors I was on proposed to our customer that our mission for the next year should be to convert our prototype R&D air traffic control simulation from Pascal into C++. We were (stupidly) surprised when the customer declined, observing that the product's capabilities wouldn't advance at all but merely become a little more modern under the hood, where nobody but us contractors would ever look.

[eYrKEC2]

A craftsman in building construction values his tools as well. You will see contempt on a journeyman's face if you hand him a Harbor Freight circular saw, but he will ogle your Fesstool circular saw.

Some tools feel better in your hands.

[chinabot]

Funnily I am in the same situation but from the other side being the aging (60+) Pascal contractor who came in to a small company when there was no IT staff and wrote a complete MRP/ERP/Everything system. This small company over 15 years became a billion dollar one and I am now the only contractor in a large IT department with teams of programmers.

Ironically it is me pushing the change as there are not really many Pascal guys left and the current guys wouldn't dream of supporting such an "archaic language". I wish they would get a move on before I expire completely.

[sumtechguy]

Ah rewrites. Sometimes you have to do them. Not because you will get new features. But just so you can hire someone at a reasonable price in the near future and it will actually run on a somewhat newish computer on a tech stack that was EOL 2 decades ago. Then you also get someone who rocks in and says 'you are just using the wrong language at my previous job we used xyz and it is the best we should just switch everything over to that'. Somewhere in the middle of those two points is where you decide to rewrite it.