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> But throwing away the whole program is a dangerous folly, and if Netscape actually had some adult supervision with software industry experience, they might no

• johnmaguire2013 6y ago
  The article cited makes a strong argument for why you should not write from scratch, even with immense technical debt - and offers alternatives. For example: > Even fairly major architectural changes can be done without throwing away the code. On the Juno project we spent several months rearchitecting at one point: just moving things around, cleaning them up, creating base classes that made sense, and creating sharp interfaces between the modules. But we did it carefully, with our existing code base, and we didn’t introduce new bugs or throw away working code. > A second reason programmers think that their code is a mess is that it is inefficient. The rendering code in Netscape was rumored to be slow. But this only affects a small part of the project, which you can optimize or even rewrite. You don’t have to rewrite the whole thing. When optimizing for speed, 1% of the work gets you 99% of the bang. Quite frankly, Netscape was very good for its time. Firefox today is also drastically different than Firefox 1.0 ("It’s difficult to imagine Firefox having the success it had if it was based on the Firefox 1.0 source code").