I am struggling to find out what the best and shortest way is to describe the opposite of a legacy system (especially in software architecture, where legacy means the system used previously).
I need to use it in software so I can create methods such as:
find_legacy_record and
find_[opposite of legacy]_record
I tried looking in a thesaurus for synonyms of old, but nothing really fit well with my use.
Legacy is a good term in programming, because you're less likely to confuse it to something else (old can also mean a previous state of the record, not necessarily belonging to an old system).
Best Answer
Legacy (adj.) means “inherited”.¹ Legacy systems, for example, are the systems we inherited. In the software industry, it often has a negative connotation that the thing is obsolete (but not always²). An antonym would refer to recent innovations, so for that we would use terms such as:
Each of these has a unique shade of meaning and you would simply pick the one that is closest in meaning to what you intend.
Footnotes
¹ “legacy”, Collins Free Online Dictionary. This entry includes several examples of legacy as a noun modifier. These examples show that legacy always connotes inheritance, but the connotation of obsolescence comes from context. For instance, a legacy moon is apparently an astrological phenomenon:
² Stanley Quayle, “Ticketmaster and its ‘old’ system”, VMS Spoken Here. Sometimes, according to Mr Quayle, “legacy means stuff that just works”.
³ Italicized terms collected from the entry “cutting edge”, Thesaurus.com.