Rewrites Considered Harmful?

ngunton writes "When is "good enough" enough? I wrote this article to take a philosophical look at the tendency for software developers to rewrite new versions of popular tools and standards from scratch rather than work on the existing codebase. This introduces new bugs and abandons all the small fixes and tweaks that made the original version work so well. It also often introduces incompatibilities that break a sometimes huge existing userbase. Examples include IPv4 vs IPv6, Apache, Perl, Embperl, Netscape/Mozilla, HTML and Windows. "

Comments

Ego?

[Undaar]

I think it may have something to do with programmer ego and something to do with the challenge. I'm guilty of it myself. You find something you're interested in and you want to build it. It doesn't matter if someone else has done it or even done it well before you. The challenge is to do it yourself.

Re:Windows XP was a complete rewrite?

[nakhla]

Windows XP/Server 2003 were NOT complete rewrites of the OS. Many of the individual components within the OS may have received extensive retooling, but the OS as a whole was not a complete rewrite. New features were added. Existing features were modified. The code simply evolved from one version to another, just as with most products.

Joel on software article

[mitchner]

Joel on software has covered this point in a good article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 69.html.

Joel Spolsky

[Boing]

Joel of Joel on Software has written a much more insightful and useful (IMO) analysis of the motivations and fallacies behind code rewrites.

Things You Should Never Do, Part I

Re:Windows XP was a complete rewrite?

[rushfan]

Very true... One of the few "rewrites" that Microsoft has rever done is the NT codebase (which was actually more of OS/2 morphing into NT), and that wasn't a true rewrite since the "original" DOS/Win31 codebase keps livingo on with Win96/98/ME.

MS has tried some rewrites (I think they tried in Excel rewrite, I think Code Complete references that) but scraped them (also never giving up on the previous generation codebase).

That's one thing they do well (for better or worse) is not waste any money on rewrites (look at Win9x)

Rushfan

Re:Windows XP was a complete rewrite?

[Gherald]

The user's are locked down now, their programs work, and every thing is centrally administered thanks to group policy and active directory. Overall it's been very nice.

Locking the users down, group policy, and active directory are as much a part of XP as 2K.

The new UI just sucks IMNSHO

I agree.

Start --> Run --> gpedit.msc --> User Config --> Admin. Templates --> Control Panel --> Display --> Desktop Themes --> Force Windows Classic

I have a .reg file for this and other settings to speed the process, since this used to be a very small business that has grown very fast and we never bothered to set up a network-wide group policy system.

Our servers are 2K so I can't comment on 2003. I'm trying to sell the execs on using kernel 2.6 and samba 3.x for our next server. I figure something approaching 2.6.10 ought to be out by the time we are ready, so it should be stable enough.