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Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
(www.joelonsoftware.com)
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Most software is built under non-ideal circumstances. Especially in the beginning there’s often tight deadlines involved.
“Good news! We finally got a new customer! Looks like we will survive this month! Bad news. We sold a feature we don’t have yet and oh, we also promised to have it delivered by tomorrow morning, so hurry up!”
Exactly this.
I think a bunch of people commenting in this thread on the virtues of rewriting things from scratch using the flavour of the month are instead showing the world they have zero professional experience working on commercial software projects. They are clearly oblivious to very basic and pervasive constraints that anyone working on software for a living is very well aware.
Things like prioritizing how a button is laid out over fixing a rarely occurring race condition is the norm in professional settings. You are paid to deliver value to your employer, and small things like paying technical debt are very hard sells for project managers running tight schedules.
Yet, here we are, seeing people advocating complete rewrites and adding piles of complexity while throwing out major features, and doing so with a straight face.
Unbelievable.