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It's interesting to look back on this classic JoS article, with the perspective that Mozilla's rewrite-from-scratch basically kept the organisation around long

It's interesting to look back on this classic JoS article, with the perspective that Mozilla's rewrite-from-scratch basically kept the organisation around long enough for Firefox to come along, and look where that went. If Netscape hadn't made the decision to rewrite, they'd have released a browser even less well-suited for the then-modern Internet than Netscape 4 was when it came out, they'd have sunk even quicker, and there would have been nothing worth salvaging from the corpse - no Mozilla Foundation, no Suite, and ultimately no Firefox.

mattmanser 17y ago
Surely this is only really valid point if Friefox saved Netscape? Is the most pressing concern of a owner/shareholder/employee that a company starts a successful open source project? No, it's food on the table! It didn't save most people's job. Joel's point is still valid, commercially it was suicide. 3D Realm's constant rewriting of Duke Nukem Forever bottom up is another topical reminder of just how stupid it is. Another dead company.
- DannoHung 17y ago
  I think the moral is "RELEASE DAMNIT", not "don't rewrite". If you can rewrite and still release, rewrite away.
boundlessdreamz 17y ago
Yeah, If you are being bogged down by legacy code and increasingly falling behind competitors due to slow innovation, it makes sense to do a rewrite. Mozilla had nothing to lose by a rewrite and everything to gain. In the short term they suffered immensely falling behind even more but in the long term it helped them emerge stronger. It is the same with Classic Mac -> OSX. The former was crumbling under its own weight but OSX enabled Apple to out innovate others. The key point is that a rewrite should always produce something better and leaner. Two cases where it didn't happen are * In case PG's viaweb -> Yahoo store. http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02367.html http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m... * When Sony acquired Naughty Dog. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html
- jcl 17y ago
  The "Jak and Daxter" postmortem lists Naughty Dog's use of Lisp as the number five thing under "what went right" and the number one thing under "what went wrong"... (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naughty_dogs_jak_and_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naught...) The rewrite wasn't a clear loss -- especially if, as the postmortem suggests, there was exactly one person who was capable of modifying the old codebase. (Likely this is the same person being quoted in Bill Clementson's article, which suggests some amount of ownership bias. Come to think of it, the same could be said of the ViaWeb case...)
  - boundlessdreamz 17y ago
    True..but since Naughty Dog's features were due to it being written in Lisp, wouldn't it have been better if Sony trained people in Lisp ?

mattmanser 17y ago

Surely this is only really valid point if Friefox saved Netscape? Is the most pressing concern of a owner/shareholder/employee that a company starts a successful open source project? No, it's food on the table! It didn't save most people's job. Joel's point is still valid, commercially it was suicide. 3D Realm's constant rewriting of Duke Nukem Forever bottom up is another topical reminder of just how stupid it is. Another dead company.

DannoHung 17y ago
I think the moral is "RELEASE DAMNIT", not "don't rewrite". If you can rewrite and still release, rewrite away.

boundlessdreamz 17y ago

Yeah, If you are being bogged down by legacy code and increasingly falling behind competitors due to slow innovation, it makes sense to do a rewrite. Mozilla had nothing to lose by a rewrite and everything to gain. In the short term they suffered immensely falling behind even more but in the long term it helped them emerge stronger. It is the same with Classic Mac -> OSX. The former was crumbling under its own weight but OSX enabled Apple to out innovate others. The key point is that a rewrite should always produce something better and leaner. Two cases where it didn't happen are * In case PG's viaweb -> Yahoo store. http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02367.html http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m... * When Sony acquired Naughty Dog. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html

jcl 17y ago
The "Jak and Daxter" postmortem lists Naughty Dog's use of Lisp as the number five thing under "what went right" and the number one thing under "what went wrong"... (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naughty_dogs_jak_and_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naught...) The rewrite wasn't a clear loss -- especially if, as the postmortem suggests, there was exactly one person who was capable of modifying the old codebase. (Likely this is the same person being quoted in Bill Clementson's article, which suggests some amount of ownership bias. Come to think of it, the same could be said of the ViaWeb case...)
- boundlessdreamz 17y ago
  True..but since Naughty Dog's features were due to it being written in Lisp, wouldn't it have been better if Sony trained people in Lisp ?