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4. Name-recognizable companies are typically bloated enough that they can absorb the damage from a failed rewrite without it being clearly responsible for their
by a1369209993 6y ago
4. Name-recognizable companies are typically bloated enough that they can absorb the damage from a failed rewrite without it being clearly responsible for their collapse.
5. Nobody is admitting to doing rewrites from scratch anymore.
6. Netscape/Mozilla became (due to path-dependence and happenstance) the canonical example, and no other examples have been interesting/memetic enough to displace it.
7. People have learned to keep failing rewrites dragging along until something else causes them to be abandoned, sparing them the label of "failed".
8. Other.
- rizpanjwani 6y agoexactly. I can tell you from experience that one of the companies I know had consultants out of texas convince them that rewriting their bread and butter ecommerce system was the way to go instead of improving the older one which mostly worked but had some bugs now and then which could be resolved by their existing internal development team. This was a real disservice that cost the company a lot of time and money on something that had to be replaced again in a year after it was "finished" just so the consulting company could make money and give their developers something to do.
- rictic 6y agoPython 3, Angular 2, Polymer 2. Not all full rewrites, but breaking changes with lots of the pain from a rewrite.
- jariel 6y agoI would add - those are kind of monolithic style app platforms. Big, complicated, installed software. Most software is services oriented, and it evolves, piece by piece over time. Is Facebook running any of the same code from 18 years ago? Probably not? When did they re-write? They didn't, they just evolved, piece by piece.