Re:Startup Suicide -- Rewriting the Code
by cageface on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @01:46PM
(#2140279)
Agreed. Rapidly chewing through prototypes in the early stages of a project is a great way to weed out bad ideas.
Rewriting stable production code, on the other hand, is almost always a mistake.
Re:Startup Suicide -- Rewriting the Code
by kemiller on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @05:53PM
(#2141298)
Depends on what you mean by stable, and what you mean by rewrite. If your end result is buggy and unstable, it's sometimes worth using it as a rough draft and starting over. Ground up rewrites in a successful environment (which was the subject of the article) are usually wrong.
Planned, incremental refactoring or re-architecture can be quite beneficial if done right.
But what if it is years later, and you are gone and it's up to some new guys to do the rewrite?
Or in the words of Steve: A CEO who had lived through a debacle of a rewrite or understood the complexity of the code would know that with the original engineering team no longer there, the odds of making the old mistakes over again are high.
So I think you and Steve aren't really disagreeing. You're talking about the early time frame, when you are writing all the code. He is talking about the later time frame, when the company has grown and you are long gone.