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Rewrites Considered Harmful?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the but-sometimes-it's-just-plain-fun dept.

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. "

2 of 670 comments (clear)

  1. Joel on software article by mitchner · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Re:Windows XP was a complete rewrite? by rushfan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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