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A legacy application is one that has been in production for more than
twenty-four hours, and cannot now be taken back out of production.

Only in our industry is the term legacy pejorative. Ironically, I could not
find "legacy" in "jargon file" http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/.

I would suggest that legacy is generally used to refer to something that
uses a method, technique, technology, that has somehow been replaced by
something newer, and substantively and qualitatively different, so that were
the same system or application developed or deployed today using some notion
of current practices (and there's the rub), it would probably be done with
the newer item. So a legacy computer is an older model. A legacy application
is "procedural" instead of "object-oriented" or "component-based", and may
use a language that does (or whose practitioners do not) not easily support
some newer methods, or which for instance uses an older screen technology
that only allows users to proceed in certain ways (although this is great
for heads-down data entry) or does not offer interface features most now
take for granted (although no one has yet explained to my satisfaction the
difference between a drop down list or radio button drawn with characters on
a 80 x 24 grid versus a drop down list or radio button drawn in pixels).

In some cases, it is perfectly legitimate to refer to the previous iteration
of the technology as legacy, but usually without the pejorative sense. The
extreme weirdness to me is when technologies that were and still to some
degree are "hot" "become" legacy. Is C or C++ legacy? Is ODBC legacy? Is
client-server legacy? Sun and perhaps even Microsoft might have us believe
so. We have Java, and OLE and JDBC, and internet front ends now.

There have been no silver bullets. We see how all of these tools solve some
problems, and can bring with them their own, or can be badly implemented by
less than careful practitioners, just as most of us have seen "spaghetti
code" that is about as safe to work in as old abandoned buildings. Move one
little thing, and you fear that the whole thing will collapse around your
head.

Just as important, most of these "new" technologies are built on a
foundation of tried and true techniques successfully used in the previous
generation. Java was based on C++. OO is the next evolution of structured
programming. It seems as if Remus and Romulus would now slay the wolf that
raised and nurtured them. Network servers are looking more like
minicomputers, and minicomputers are looking more like mainframes, and
mainframes continue their own slower evolutions. It is an arrogance that
practitioners of some new technology think that they are Minerva, that they
sprang fully formed from Zeus's head.

"Considered legacy" by whom?

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
we're taking our son through some Greek and Roman history and mythology...
I hope I got the details right.