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.
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.
Yes. Multiple historical layers, each giving the creators way too much power over presentation, while they are still supposed to handle stuff like accessibility themselves, making a company webpage a thousand manhours project. Browsers being monoliths is only one page of the book.
So we agree that browsers are way too complex?
This is reaching a level of idiocy that's completely unheard of.
Just say you know nothing about what you're saying and you're completely oblivious, and sit out the rest of the discussion.
Please refrain from using personal insults in this community. You're free to express your opinion, but personal insults does nothing but make the community more toxic. c/programming is a gathering ground for both inexperienced and experienced programmers, so this level of lashing out is uncalled for.