Comments on: Don’t write from scratch

By: AlexM

AlexM — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:02:39 +0000

I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!

By: pascal

pascal — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:08:07 +0000

Thanks to all those readers pointing out what a looser/loser i am. I’ll invest my next salary in a spellchecker :-).
And thanks for reading.

By: Barry Kelly

Barry Kelly — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:43:38 +0000

Delphi in the same breath as Cobol and Fortran! Oh dear! FWIW, I work for CodeGear (now part of Embarcadero) on the Delphi compiler, and ironically enough, it’s one of those C programs that has you itching to rewrite. I had a longer comment, but I moved it on my blog, as it was getting big…

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:40:40 +0000

Please stop perpetuating this received wisdom. Many of the people that believe rewrites are always bad, have been blessed to work in places where, while the code might be ugly, isn’t hopelessly unusable. Joel would fall into this category, in fact Joel does not have a wide breadth of experience in the different and typically cost focused working environments that face most programmers.

A lot of the antipathy towards rewrites comes from situations where a team produces a project that sucks, they then recognize it sucks and then attempt a rewrite. Personally I think this is a waste of time because you’re not going to get a better result the second time around if you didn’t have the smarts and experience to build it in a more ‘refactorable’ way initially.

I have been involved in many successful rewrites that solved many problems and ultimately saved a lot of money. Rewrites are not evil, stupid programmers are.

By: Goofy

Goofy — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:04:27 +0000

“What’s a looser?”, she said. “Is it someone who sets things free, or unbinds things?”

“Loose the Dogs of War”, he said.

“Did you ‘lose’ your car keys, you ‘loser’?”

“I swear to God, I’m losing my mind!”, said the loser.

Well, you get the idea.

By: Sergej Andrejev

Sergej Andrejev — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:28:08 +0000

Pheu, I can assure you that Joel learned things the same way we all do, the hard way. So unless anybody who reads this post will mist few deadlines because rewriting is soooo cool, he won’t understand a word from what you are saying.
Actually I’m fine with this, I do rewrite a lot. Not everybody likes me as you can imagine =]].

By: Vincent

Vincent — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:56:51 +0000

There are some cases where a rewrite would have been profitable in the long-term. The best example is Twitter. The initial codebase was not meant to be what Twitter is right now. Instead of just rewrite the application, they streched the initial architecture up to its limits and now they struggle. They finally decided to rewrite it from scratch.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:44:08 +0000

Sometimes you find that it’s easier to start from scratch than fix all of the bugs. When the old developers obviously didn’t know what they were doing when the system was created 6 years ago, I think it’s ok to rm -rf * and start over :)

By: markus

markus — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:10:16 +0000

I agree more or less except for one important part:

“The system evolved over time”

THIS, and it is my serious experience, can REALLY become bad.

Sometimes solutions are not clear exactly because they evolved slowly.

Evolving often means that things go the fastest route to success but not
always is this the SHORTEST or BEST route.

By: Peter Schoenster

Peter Schoenster — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:05:55 +0000

Where is refactor? Also, you have probably only worked at places that had some sort of standards. Ever seen a 5000 line script without a function where the programmer relied on a run time error to stop a loop because “it worked”. Seriously … some code is begging for a refactoring. As you did not mention it I wonder if you equate refactor with rewrite.