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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 ha
by 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 agoThe "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 agoTrue..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 ?