Informal Survey: Do Rewrites Really Fail?

“In a now famous article by Joel Spolsky, he argues that you
should never rewrite projects from scratch. To be fair, I’ve done
this, but generally on open-source projects where I’m donating my
time. I’m less worried about financial constraints or competitive
advantage.

“Aside from that edge case, I generally agree with Joel Spolsky.
If something is a tiny project, refactoring is often trivial and if
you want to do a rewrite, so be it. However, large projects are
often dangerous to rewrite. But how did they become large
projects…?”

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