Elon: Code is brittle. Need a complete rewrite

"Second system syndrome" is what came to my mind. But I'm wicked old.

Enterprise code is brittle. It's limited by business requirements like having multiple teams working on the same feature, or having the flexibility to change teams and have new people work on partially finished code.

In theory we could make software that lasts for decades, given some languages have been around for that long. Even if the programming languages changed, software could be abstracted and worked on a level that transcends technical specs. The problem is that it is not viable for large organizations with hundreds of engineers that are constantly rotating and changing focus. Business is too short-term oriented to care for any benefits of long-term engineering. I'm not saying it's good or bad, and maybe this changes as we move further and further into the information age.

Moonshot project: stick half a dozen devs in an office and have them rewrite Twitter’s backend in Rust, and stick another half a dozen devs in the next office and have them rewrite Twitter’s frontend in Elixir/Phoenix.

Then he should go ahead and rewrite it himself.

Elon sure reminds me of an inexperienced, over-confident (or "just enough experience to be dangerous") software engineer at times.

One who has enough experience to see flaws in an existing (or "legacy") system and feel they could do better if they just rewrote it all from scratch, but not enough experience (or too much hubris) to know how well that does or does not go in practice.

He may be right, of course. I'm just pattern matching on what he sounds like...