Joel's excellent essay does not apply here. The Netscape re-write was a re-write. That is, it was not a translation. Netscape looked at their code base, and dec

Joel's excellent essay does not apply here. The Netscape re-write was a re-write. That is, it was not a translation. Netscape looked at their code base, and decided, "We don't like the design of the architecture of our code. We're going to throw it out, re-design it, and re-implement it from scratch." The Dropbox team clearly did not do that. They translated it from one language to another; the design did not change. Much of that translation was with an automatic tool. Again, there is a difference between re-implementing something, and translating it. Further, the examples in Joel's posts took years. This took a week. The situations are completely different. Personally, I find it disingenuous to link to an article and say "He has my argument" without actually stating what your argument is.