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A comment on The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad. Parent comment

Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by bh42222 on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @10:15AM (#3265770)
There's rewrites and there's rewrites. I think what Joel is against is the starting from scratch rewrite, I agree with him on this.

But I don't think Joel is against a slow, one line at a time, working on the old code base rewrite.

It is not clear what kind of re-write the OP is advocating. But I would be surprised if he is pro the start from scratch kind.

But it might be just my biased perception.

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Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by jerf on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @11:11AM (#3266033)
It is also worth pointing out Joel says "don't rewrite" specifically in the context of a software company, where I strongly believe it is largely correct. In the context of a decades-old open source project the decision may be quite different for legitimate reasons.

I find it likely that you'd be better off performing an algorithm extraction and doing a true from-scratch rewrite than trying to incrementally translate TeX and LaTeX.

For the reader's convenience and reference: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

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