I watched a team invent a new language to get around updating some eccentric code.

They could have sat down and commented it and made their changes

They could have refactored what was there.

They could have scrapped it and wrote fresh

Instead, they designed an entire natural language system so that non-programmers who were writing in XML could just write in English.

They ended up making so many required keywords as helpers that the non-programmers kept using the old system because the XML was easier for them work with.

Note: wasn't my code, wasn't my dept, when I heard the plan I went to check it out, the old system was functional but like C- work at best. At some point, they wrote a compiler for the new system.