What is a TurtleStack?

Most developers love to complain about legacy software. In a field which requires constant learning, working on something written using older technology can feel like an obstacle to career growth. So, older software is labeled with the knee-jerk pejorative, "legacy". It's old. It's slow. It's a TurtleStack.

This poses a challenging problem for businesses and management. If a piece of software has been in use for a while, that means that it provides business value. That's not something you're going to throw away for the sake of chasing the latest technology fad or for a developer to pad their resume. At the same time, an employer wants to be able to attract new talent. You don't want to be shelling out absurd wages in order to attract one of the five remaining COBOL programmers to your outfit.

Striking the right balance is difficult. A seasoned manager may recognize that vanilla javascript is perfectly fine for a small application, but will acquiesce to developer pleas to use React. They see both sides of the coin and need to make a judgement call. To them the legacy software is a source of stability, but one that requires maintenance and upkeep.

There are many traditions throughout mankind that have used the turtle in there cosmology as the foundation of the world. It is obvious why this element from the natural world would be used to symbolize the firmament. This is what I mean when I use the term TurtleStack. Software which serves the business and cannot be allowed to decay.

Image courtesy of Pauline De Mars.