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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. Windows ? by HawkingMattress · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I didn't RTFA, but Windows, seems a pretty bad example of an useless rewrite, if we're talking about the rewrite from 9x to NT5

  2. IPv6 by thedanyes · · Score: 0, Redundant

    ermm IPv6 is 128 bits rather than the 64 the article incorrectly states.