54
Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
(www.joelonsoftware.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
54 points (95.0% liked)
Programming
17025 readers
192 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
You think web browsers should not exist? How do you write Google Chrome, and all of it's dependencies, in one page of code?
I think you're miss-understanding the article. Joel didn't say you should never rewrite an individual component in your code, he was saying you should never throw out an entire project (all of the components) and start from scratch.
He also wasn't talking about "multiple people and man-years of work". He was talking much larger projects. How many people have contributed Chrome? Not just direct contributions writing lines of code, but indirect contributions such as reporting bugs or writing documentation on how it works?
If Google were to start over, all of that would be thrown out. It just can't be done.
All you can really do is what Microsoft did with IE / Edge. Edge was a fork of Chromium which was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KTHML which was a fork of the KDE HTML Widget. Which dates back to 1996. Internet Explorer started in 1995. Microsoft didn't start Edge from scratch, they basically shifted their team of developers over to another project that was the same age.
The smaller the project, the easier it is to do a full rewrite but realistically it's almost never a good idea unless your product is very young.
They actually did somewhat start Edge from scratch originally. They made EdgeHTML as a rewrite of the IE 11 trident engine.
In the end they abandoned it and moved over to chromium. One of the reasons being Google intentionally breaking their sites for EdgeHTML.