Sure, elegance is attainable in any language and I definitely agree that large rewrites (especially involving a language change) are at best perilous, however i

Sure, elegance is attainable in any language and I definitely agree that large rewrites (especially involving a language change) are at best perilous, however it seemed to me that the OP's point was largely about common attitudes. Having seen a few large projects detonate under similar circumstances as described in the movie I believe he has a point. In all instances the timeline went something like this: - several year old codebase (now bloated with so many change requests the original design is completely buried) - new project manager enters stage right with a gleam in his and and a plan to "modernize" the codebase - Ruby selected as the language of choice for the rewrite - 8 months to a year of code churn later project is abandoned Now given language hopping large scale rewrites are typically a bad idea, especially if you're converting an existing shop with a different language of choice and established workflows, one has to ask what would lead any otherwise rational individual to decide engaging in a project of this scope is viable. In all of the instances of this kind of project flameout I've observed a PM (or higher) was so enamored of some "sexy"* new technology that all other concerns where cast aside and predictably carnage ensued. * For values of sexy that include: Ruby, NoSQL and just about any other arguably (im)mature tech that's getting a lot of column inches in the tech blog arena.