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When Rewriting an App Actually Makes Sense

Posted by timothy on from the old-app-was-starting-to-fester dept.

vlangber writes "Joel Spolsky wrote a famous blog post back in 2000 called 'Things You Should Never Do, Part I,' where he wrote the following: '[T]he single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.' Here is a story about a software company that decided to rewrite their application from scratch, and their experiences from that process."

4 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Here's my short list by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    5. When it is written in Visual Basic. Always.
    4. When I'm getting paid by the hour and it is written in Visual Basic. Always
    3. When it was written in a mid-90s WYSIWIG bastard child of a mid-80s interpreted language.
    2. When it uses a thousand "IF-THEN-ELSE" when it means to use regular expressions
    1. When it is written in Visual basic.

    1. Re:Here's my short list by PRMan · · Score: 5, Funny

      5. When it is written in Visual Basic. Always.
      4. When I'm getting paid by the hour and it is written in Visual Basic. Always
      3. When it was written in a mid-90s WYSIWIG bastard child of a mid-80s interpreted language.
      2. When it uses multiple five-to-ten thousand line case statements
      1. When it is written in Access basic.

      This is why I am currently rewriting everything from scratch in .NET at my company.

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
  2. Re:6 KB wasted on fucking VIEWSTATE data. by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Funny

    If they can, they really should disable the generation of that. It's a useless artifact of the broken ASP.NET WebForms approach, which isn't really even necessary for a blog like theirs.

    Are you suggesting a rewrite?

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  3. Re:And why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    He spent 3 years dead for tax reasons.