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I think the unspoken and (imo) wrong assumption here is that if you have a codebase which nobody understands, and the success of your organization relies on ite
by JoshuaDavid 7y ago
I think the unspoken and (imo) wrong assumption here is that if you have a codebase which nobody understands, and the success of your organization relies on iterating rapidly and correctly on that codebase for its continued survival, there is anything you can do that has a high probability of success.
If you are in that situation, and you do not do a rewrite, you are likely to fail.
If you are in that situation, and you do a rewrite, you are likely to fail.
Sometimes there is no winning move.
- goto11 7y agoI don't doubt the existing code was a mess, but I'm pretty sure their time would have been better spent refactoring it into a more modular structure. For example, what actually made people switch to Firefox eventually was tabs and a popup-blocker. There was no need to rewrite the entire network stack from scratch to support this.