Andrew Harbourne-Thomas wrote: >If it ain't broke don't fix it. > Sorry to get serious here, but I just want to comment on just how much I hate the above expression. 'Way back in '83 I was working for a company that shall remain nameless (oh, what the hey, it was McAuto and I was a systems programmer for their Unigraphics software). Anyway, I was tracking down a bug and came across the date conversion subroutine (this is FORTRAN, mind). The base of the algorithm involved using some 'seed' values in a 12-element array. Each year it would advance to the next element and '83 was the tenth element. I brought to my manager's attention that in three years this routine would walk off the end of the array and would, in essence, break. He told me that it had worked just fine for ten years, "...if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and to concentrate on my assignment.
Sure enough, when I showed up for work on the first workday of '86, the place was already a madhouse. Customers had been calling all during the New Year's weekend. As of one second after midnight, December 31, Unigraphics thought the date was April 14, 1847 (or somewhere close to that). Remember this was the day before CDs and Internet downloading. All our customers had to be shipped the fix on a reel of 9-track tape! The cost of this Y2K foreshadowing event was in the 100s of thousands of dollars (and this was back when a hundred K was real money) and a loss of customer confidence that probably took years to regain. It would have taken me fifteen minutes to fix what was not yet broke. I later found out I was not the only programmer to bring this to management's attention. They had been told on at least three occasions about it. As far as I know, they all went on and retired from there years later. I left (for different reasons). Another expression that thankfully seems to have faded into obscurity is the one about how software, unlike hardware, never wears down so once it works it always works. Y2K seems to have killed that one. If it ain't broke, it can always be improved. Tomm To change your membership options, refer to: http://www.sys-con.com/java/list.cfm
