Comments on: Go Ahead, Do The Big Rewrite

By: The Big Rewrite - Other articles | Lazycoder

The Big Rewrite - Other articles | Lazycoder — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:28:50 +0000

[…] Adam Wiggins: Go Ahead, do the big Rewrite […]

By: Nikhil Bach

Nikhil Bach — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:25:16 +0000

This one makes sence “One’s first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything - and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”

By: SuezanneC Baskerville

SuezanneC Baskerville — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:25:01 +0000

Given the existence of company A with a successful product, why would it be possible for company B to produce a successful competitor from scratch but impossible for company A to produce a successful new version from scratch?

By: SuezanneC Baskerville

SuezanneC Baskerville — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:46:16 +0000

Surely there must be examples of new software products successfully competing with perhaps outdoing existing legacy applications. Wouldn’t the new successful competition have had to do the equivalent of a complete rewrite?

By: rchf

rchf — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:35:02 +0000

Mark - “Eventual [sic] the nvaigator codebase gave rise to seamonkey and firefox, after the war was lost.”

Every war ‘won’ can become tomorrow’s battle ‘lost’. Better to compromise. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t compromise so eventually it will lose. Firefox, Open Doc, OpenID, the lost battles for Micrsoft are becoming more frequent.

By: mark

mark — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 01:21:12 +0000

“Although I agree with Chadâ€™s arguments and to a lesser degree with Joelâ€™s, I canâ€™t help but to notice: what Joel called a huge mistake turned into Firefox,”

From this sentance I can’t tell if you have your history right. Netscape rewrote navigator when IE was coming on strong. That was a disaster. Eventual the nvaigator codebase gave rise to seamonkey and firefox, after the war was lost.

By: adam

adam — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 23:12:40 +0000

Peter: Right you are. Of course Netscape was already a business failure - they made their browser code open source as a sort of last-gasp, desperation move. Which actually worked for wounding their enemy, but didn’t do a thing for making them any dough. So this should definitely not be considered a guide for business rewrites. (Or maybe it should. It took ~3 years to have a working browser again, so just try telling the management “I hope you don’t mind if you don’t have any software for the next three years while we work on this”)

Zach: Excellent follow-up. “Only rewrite if you will be able to make significant design improvements based on understanding gained from the previous version” seems like about a simple a rule of thumb as one is likely to get on this subject.

By: Zach Baker

Zach Baker — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:48:46 +0000

Joel rejects rewrites as a strategic mistake for a company, not so much a technical mistake, so I don’t think Firefox is exactly a counterexample. But I like your perspective on “big rewrites”. I thought of a practical rewrite suggestion from my experience so I wrote it up on my weblog:

http://www.zachbaker.com/articles/2007/01/11/rewriting-software-from-scratch

By: Peter Harkins

Peter Harkins — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:19:15 +0000

From Joel’s business perspective, the Mozilla rewrite was indeed a failure: Netscape lots its market share and got absorbed by AOL. The project was eventually a technical success, but Joel’s point is that technical decisions are business decisions.