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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. "

5 of 670 comments (clear)

  1. speaking of IPv6 vs IPv4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Will IPv6 ever take off?

  2. Not first post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    This is not the first post so you may continue reading.

  3. Other People's Code Is Crap by FatHogByTheAss · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    While mine is fine like wine.

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    You sure got a purty mouth...

  4. PARENT IS A COPIED POST by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Mod parent down.

  5. Re:Design desitions by aled · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I think there's some office oral tradition that relates that with something called vacations.

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    "I think this line is mostly filler"