Frankenstein Point

The FrankensteinPoint is the threshold past which a person regards a medical procedure as "unnatural". Heart transplants were, just a generation ago, regarded as past the FrankensteinPoint. These days, it's human cloning. A touchy one for many people is cryonics.

A book on robotics I once read had a graph depicting peoples' squeamishness factor as a function of 'realism' of a robot's appearance - there was an interesting peak as the robot appearance approached human, but not real close - people were much less bothered by a metallic robot then by one with skin-tone plastic skin.

A can imagine the FrankenStein point of a system. After so many changes (maintenance) the system becomes a Frankenstein. It is then a good idea to StartItOver?.

A strongly held view in these parts is that RefactoringIsBetterThanRewriting?, at least for code that wasn't intended to be disposable (SpikeSolution).

FrankenCode? is the result of indiscriminate and wanton use of CopyAndPasteProgramming and lack of application of RefactorMercilessly. See also DesignDebt for a more PhbFriendly? term.

I once helped to maintain a system that was developed in FortranLanguage, CobolLanguage and AlgolLanguage. A typical FrankenStein.