How to migrate scary legacy software nobody wants to touch
Old business applications built on outdated codebases like Visual FoxPro or ancient scripts accumulate unmaintainable complexity over decades, making developers terrified to touch them. This fear stalls modernization efforts and leaves companies trapped using fragile systems that constantly risk breaking business operations.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Rewriting the system from scratch using modern client/server architectures
- 2Writing custom data conversion scripts to bridge legacy databases to modern backends
- 3Keeping the antique software running indefinitely without updates
- 4Doing the code migration manually by hand script by script.
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“ive been looking at this exact problem for my company and honestly its scary how many scripts we have running from 2014 that nobody wants to touch.”source ↗
“I worked with a physician's office in 2006, and the lead physician had cobbled together a system for patient tracking using Visual FoxPro. It was a monstrosity, and using it over a network drive gave all sorts of file locks and issues with multiple people changing the same record (usually the physician and front of house staff when checking the patient out).”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 4Is it too late to shift from NetSuite to Oracle Fusion or DevOps?
- 2Why do old apps keep working on new servers?
- 2How to convince my boss to move from paper to digital accounting
- 6How to migrate data without breaking deep object dependencies