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If I Could Wave a Magic Wand

ten talk about rewriting code and almost as often talk about whether big rewrites are even a good idea. Joel Spolsky writes a particularly harrowing story of how netscape rewrote their entire codebase and in so doing perhaps doomed their chances of recovery.

Joel Spolsky writes a particularly harrowing story of how netscape rewrote their entire codebase and in so doing perhaps doomed their chances of recovery. I find that usually (good) programmers enter a new project with idealistic dreams of ripping out the walls; this could be done differently, that could be removed entirely, and so on. If we’ve already decided we aren’t going to rewrite it, why bother thinking about some perfect solution we’re never going to make?

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