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A Descent into the Maelstrom: Teaching Legacy Programming and Re-engineering

Published: 24 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Computer science is a discipline which has swiftly evolved since its inception in the 1950s. This has invariably meant that new courses introduced into a curriculum are often of the bleeding-edge sort: genetic algorithms, parallel processing, mobile-based applications. Programming languages too have changed as progress ensues. Yet little is discussed of the darker side of computer science - the huge repositories of what some term legacy software running our financial, scientific and engineering systems. This paper looks at the introduction of a course which teaches legacy languages and the process of re-engineering with the aim to instill a reverence for the role legacy software plays in the modern world.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCSE '15: Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
    February 2015
    766 pages
    ISBN:9781450329668
    DOI:10.1145/2676723
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 24 February 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. ada
    2. cobol
    3. fortran
    4. legacy software
    5. reengineering

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    SIGCSE '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 289 submissions, 36%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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