54
Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
(www.joelonsoftware.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Programming
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Boy do I ever disagree with this.
For big projects, with multiple people and man-years of work, sure. Don’t start from scratch. But in my humble opinion, those projects shouldn’t really exist. Instead they should be atomic, made up of small page-length units which individually can be scraped and rebuilt.
For small projects, rewriting is often superb. It allows us to reorganize a mess, apply new knowledge, add neat features and doodads, etc.
This is a weird take given that the majority of projects relevant to this article are massive projects with hundreds or thousands of developers working on them, over time periods that can measure in decades.
Pretending those don't exist and imagining fantasy scenarios where all large projects are made up of small modular pieces (while conveniently making no mention to all of the new problems this raises in practice).
Replace functions replace files and rewrite modules, that's expected and healthy for any project. This article is referring to the tendency for programmers to believe that an entire project should be scrapped and rewritten from scratch. Which seems to have nothing to do with your comment...?