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Re:Long Term Refactors by BurningFrog on Saturday January 27, 2024 @08:00PM (#39161473)
> "let's create a brand new service where we will keep everything clean

This is maybe the core delusion here.

Somehow people think that the next project they start from scratch will have clean well factored code, even though empirically all their previous projects have not.

Re:Long Term Refactors by steveBK123 on Saturday January 27, 2024 @08:09PM (#39161527)
Every single time. The code base is what it is because of the business requirements, management, priorities and timescales demanded.

Any new system will end up in the same place very quickly.

Sometimes I've even seen management in on the delusion and promising "this time is different" to the devs.

Re:Long Term Refactors by Jaygles on Sunday January 28, 2024 @12:18AM (#39162830)
The first version evolves over time to new requirements, which introduces cruft as you can never prepare your code to be extended to every new requirement. Subsequent versions/rewrites benefit from that history. Using the existing version as a complete spec, and the history of evolutions as a clue to how to set up extendability, gives re-writes a distinct advantage in producing better code.