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0 pointswheels3y ago0 comments

So, full disclosure, I worked 4 years in SAP's LinuxLab (ending 16 years ago). I also hated interacting with their interfaces, but I do understand why they exist:

Comparison with hosting your own email is like a dozen orders of magnitude off in complexity. SAP really only makes sense for ginormous corporations, but up in that range, Oracle's ERP is the only real competition. Just the kernel of SAP is on the order of 100 million lines of code, and that's not counting the even more hundreds of millions of lines of business logic.

It'd be more like saying, "I'm going to reinvent email, write all clients, servers, and try to get everyone to adopt it." Except that would still be a few orders of magnitude off.

SAP has modules that handle regulatory issues in virtually every country in the world. There's so much business complexity that's encoded into its systems that it's literally hard for mere mortals to grasp.

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Cthulhu_3y ago

I mean I'm pretty confident that if SAP was rebuilt from scratch today, one could reimplement its core functionality within a tenth or less of that amount of code you mentioned.

But there's literally decades of use cases and experience contained in that code. That's one major issue with people thinking about rewriting software, they vastly underestimate the amount of things in there.

I mean on the surface SAP is just a database with a UI and some business rules - 99% of software is - but that in itself is so often underestimated.

(Source: anecdotal, I underestimated 'just' a configuration interface, except that it had hundreds of models and thousands of fields. In hindsight I should've looked for an off-the-shelf data management thing where all I would have had to do was configure the fields and validation rules and some rough layout. Instead I tried to build it in naive Go, sqlite, a REST API and a React/bootstrap front-end. It's a great solution IMO, but not if you're a solo developer working on a domain that big).

wheelsOP3y ago

Almost all software could be rewritten to be more concise. But SAP's actually too big to have one architect get an overview of everything and then conceive of an optimal solution. Anything with its level of complexity will have to have evolved to get to that point.

And if you managed to get it down to only 10% of its current size, it'd still be several times larger than the Linux kernel.

SAP makes copious amounts of money, so naturally people have tried to replace it. So far, they have not succeeded.

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