A couple of instances of this come to mind. One is Paul Graham's story of Trevor Blackwell rewriting the viaweb code in Smalltalk. Paul said No. Reddit was wri

A couple of instances of this come to mind. One is Paul Graham's story of Trevor Blackwell rewriting the viaweb code in Smalltalk. Paul said No. Reddit was written originally in Lisp, but they rewrote it in Python. That stuck. I think that attributing resistance to the off-hours rewrite just because of minimizing risk is oversimplifying the issue.