Re: OT: Why is C so popular?
On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 01:08:56PM -0700, Mark Ferlatte wrote:
> Ron Johnson said on Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 02:16:22PM -0500:
> > With tight budgets and tight schedules, I've *never* seen a project
> > rewritten.
>
> Rewriting from scratch is dangerous anyway; you exchange all of the
> bugs you know about for a whole new set of bugs which you haven't
> discovered yet. Better to improve what you've got. This can result in
> a totally different codebase after a while, but at least you have been
> able to test and release along the way.
Amen, brother. I spend a fair bit of my time in Debian trying to stop
people from rewriting things and getting them to fix existing code
instead. It's an uphill struggle: for some people rewriting from scratch
seems to be much sexier.
I've seen maybe one or two occurrences where rewriting from scratch was
actually worth it. Before that's the case, the existing code has to be a
complete nightmare and you have to have a deadline to add some new
feature or other to it. It does happen, but it is (and should be) rare.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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