I would like to see one other aspect discussed though: quickness to market. At my job, we are rewriting some pretty terrible vb5 code. It's easy to just WTF a

I would like to see one other aspect discussed though: quickness to market. At my job, we are rewriting some pretty terrible vb5 code. It's easy to just WTF a lot, and complain that there are truly insane things inside of it. The flipside of that, is that this code was quickly built and quickly allowed for a revenue stream. The author mentioned that thrown away python code provides no value, but I'm not convinced of that statement. The development time could have been significantly shortened, allowing for a revenue stream while the site was rebuilt in C++. While this may seem like wasted development, it could have created incoming money at three months rather than eight months, helping keep the lights on. Further, there are conceivably problems that would come about during development that would impact their design, which they would have to figure out. Solving these problems are irrespective of the language implementation, and using a dynamic but slower language could help them nail down theoretical issues in algorithms, api, and infrastructure, before coding in the c++ system. A counter point to this though, is that often, there is no budget for a rewrite. I'm wondering if they would be constrained by the prototype becomes long lasting production like in our case.