[Bluestein]

> I wish I could feel that kinship with the programmer who wrote the code that I now have to maintain and extend

By all means it could, should (must?) be that way.-

> Maybe that's how it is with masons too? You never know what you might find behind the facade :-)

To that, indeed. Who knows what "debt" or "enshittifcation" is hiding behind obscure technical details of any craft, seen by experts alone ...

That said, by an large, cathedrals have endured the test of time. I so wish we could say the same about the systems we are building nowadays.-

[nxobject]

The cathedrals in our industry pop up when least expected. I doubt the first IRS, Sabre, or American Express programmers working on IBM mainframes in the 60s/70s thought their programs would last so long, even at great cost.

[Bluestein]

Indeed. Cathedrals built with COBOL.-