I like the concept of re-factoring, where one takes an existing program and leaves the user interface essentially the same, retains the API and the rest of the black box characteristics, but rewrites the innards in whatever fashion is most effective.
I'm generally inclined to be a bit sloppy about tolerating things that work and are available not being ideally built inside, and pessimistic about wholly new developments in the NHS at least - maintenance is easier to keep going than starting again from scratch, for all the eagerness to sell us wholly new systems, and write them using whatever is newest. We appear to have been promised a larger system than has ever been written, running .Net (which afaik has never run on any major scale) prepared more quickly than any otehr large public project, and naturally, since it will be all new technology, both cheaper and more reliable as well as enormous fun to use. Oh, real soon now. Doesn't it make your heart sink. -- From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/
