> Rewrites in general have a bad reputation This is because of Spolsky's classic essay deriding rewrites, but that was in the context of a software company in

> Rewrites in general have a bad reputation This is because of Spolsky's classic essay deriding rewrites, but that was in the context of a software company in a competitive market where the cost of a rewrite had to be weighed against the opportunity cost of letting your competitors erode your market share with shiny new features that you could have been matching otherwise. Absent a competitive market (e.g. in volunteer OSS) rewrites are often quite successful, as long as they're undertaken by the original authors of the tool and as long as they avoid the second-system effect. (Note that nowhere does it say that rewrites must be in a new language.)