5 ms·

Please bear in mind the counter article everyone is citing (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog

Please bear in mind the counter article everyone is citing (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) was written 11 years ago. I'm not saying that it's wrong because it's from 11 years ago, but you really want to consider its central example. Netscape 6.0 was a complete rewrite. The article claims that this was a mistake. Now, if you would recall, one of the reasons Netscape 6.0 was completely rewritten was to use Raptor/NGLayout. Raptor/NGLayout was later renamed to Gecko. Gecko is the currently developed Firefox rendering engine, and Netscape 6.0 marked the start of the Mozilla foundation. I would harshly argue that Gecko would not have taken off nearly as well without Netscape's rewrite. But this is definitely not a story about Gecko's popularity. It's about the reason why Gecko was the decision they took at the time, and the current impact of Gecko. Besides the fact that Gecko was one of the early open-source success stories, the reason why Netscape decided to scrap everything and start from scratch was simple: Netscape 4.0 was horrid. Remember back to the days of IE vs Netscape. Netscape was significantly slower, and had no dynamic HTML among many other features. It was buggy and would crash frequently. And the development on the "continuation" of 4.0 code was simply too slow to compete, because of outdated, not modulated code, and stuff stuck in that simply "worked," and never changed to allow for future changes. Now, people attribute Netscape 6 to Netscape's death because of this radical decision. But take a look at Netscape's usage statistics: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/16/Netscape_Navigator_usage_share.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/16/Netscape_Navig... . Hey, guess when Netscape 4.0 came out and IE started to dominate? 1996-1997. By 2000, when Netscape 6 was released, Netscape's usage already dwindled down to nothing. Now, you're thinking, why didn't Gecko save Netscape? It takes too long to reverse these tides. Netscape was already dead. AOL acquired Netscape in 1998, to combat IE. Then, in 2003, AOL won an antitrust suit against Microsoft, and allowed AOL to use IE royalty-free. Netscape was pretty much scrapped at that moment because the damage had been done. But wait. Mozilla released Phoenix in 2004, based on Gecko. You should now the story from there. (Clue: Phoenix -> Firefox) Disclaimer: I'm not saying that Firefox > IE or Chrome or whatever. I'm saying that the codebase Netscape 4.0 was based on was doomed to fail. Gecko still lives on today, and was started as a rewrite of Netscape. Anyway, my point is, there are times to rewrite things, and there are times to keep them the same. If you have a good, legitimate reason to rewrite, as Netscape or NowJS did, you should. If you are just the stubborn programmer that always implements his own Queue or QuickSort when libraries exist, don't.

dasher 15y ago
Holding onto code just because is a foolish notion. Sometimes approaching things with a fresh perspective is what's best - it allows you to apply what you've learned so far and actually improve not just one section of code, but the whole kit & caboodle. This is one of the reasons you should write tests as you develop - it ensures you have a consistent baseline you can apply. As a developer you are constantly learning & evolving. If you're not confident enough to draw a line under what you've done, step back and evaluate your position and rewrite it when needed - that's fine, but others find it an effective approach to building something bigger, better and more sustainable.
- tedkalaw 15y ago
  I think that this applies to the technology you're using as well. I've been thinking about this because I'm writing an application in Rails and realized relatively recently that it would be better suited as a Node application. My motivation for using Rails was that it was what I knew the best. Luckily for me, the most time-consuming part was the front-end, not the Rails part, so I'm hoping my switch to Node will be relatively painless.
jerf 15y ago
Throwing away Netscape 4 and rewriting it from scratch wasn't a bad decision because nothing good ever came of it; it was a bad decision because it killed the company. The shattered remnant of Netscape that hobbled across the finish line to release "Netscape 6" wasn't even Netscape anymore, it was a rapidly fading division of AOL, IIRC, that just stamped its name on a Mozilla product it had little to do with producing at that point, to widespread derision. As bad as Netscape 4/5 may have been, while I can't guarantee trying to refactor instead of rewrite would have gone better, I can guarantee it couldn't have had any worse a result than the Total Death that was the actual result. And the phoenix-return of Mozilla is the exception, not the rule.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  To be pedantic, there is at least one fate worse than the Total Death we observed: Total Death + no Gecko. Even though ths external case is stronger, this holds true even from the company's perspective. AOL continued to release Gecko-derived browsers through 2007. They got something from that (even if it was just AIM installs and propping up the fading Netscape brand for other purposes).

dasher 15y ago

Holding onto code just because is a foolish notion. Sometimes approaching things with a fresh perspective is what's best - it allows you to apply what you've learned so far and actually improve not just one section of code, but the whole kit & caboodle. This is one of the reasons you should write tests as you develop - it ensures you have a consistent baseline you can apply. As a developer you are constantly learning & evolving. If you're not confident enough to draw a line under what you've done, step back and evaluate your position and rewrite it when needed - that's fine, but others find it an effective approach to building something bigger, better and more sustainable.

tedkalaw 15y ago
I think that this applies to the technology you're using as well. I've been thinking about this because I'm writing an application in Rails and realized relatively recently that it would be better suited as a Node application. My motivation for using Rails was that it was what I knew the best. Luckily for me, the most time-consuming part was the front-end, not the Rails part, so I'm hoping my switch to Node will be relatively painless.

jerf 15y ago

Throwing away Netscape 4 and rewriting it from scratch wasn't a bad decision because nothing good ever came of it; it was a bad decision because it killed the company. The shattered remnant of Netscape that hobbled across the finish line to release "Netscape 6" wasn't even Netscape anymore, it was a rapidly fading division of AOL, IIRC, that just stamped its name on a Mozilla product it had little to do with producing at that point, to widespread derision. As bad as Netscape 4/5 may have been, while I can't guarantee trying to refactor instead of rewrite would have gone better, I can guarantee it couldn't have had any worse a result than the Total Death that was the actual result. And the phoenix-return of Mozilla is the exception, not the rule.

fpgeek 15y ago
To be pedantic, there is at least one fate worse than the Total Death we observed: Total Death + no Gecko. Even though ths external case is stronger, this holds true even from the company's perspective. AOL continued to release Gecko-derived browsers through 2007. They got something from that (even if it was just AIM installs and propping up the fading Netscape brand for other purposes).