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A comment on Software Rot (2017). Parent comment

Re:Software Rot (2017) by badfrog on Monday February 25, 2019 @10:54AM (#19246471)
In my experience the re-write always takes much longer than expected. Sure you might be able to redo the core pieces to handle the new problem in X weeks, but then it's going to take another 4*X weeks to handle all the edge cases and make sure you're not breaking anything your clients/users have grown to depend on.

From another HN thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19245485

> The first 90% of the code takes the first 90% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.

And

> With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody

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Re:Software Rot (2017) by Scooty on Friday March 01, 2019 @05:06PM (#19285788)
For sure. That's what I meant by "it's not in the budget". I would probably choose to rewrite most projects I work on, but I know it's completely unreasonable for most non-trivial projects. I just meant I naturally gravitate towards wanting to rewrite because clean slates are satisfying.
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