Ironically, it was "rethinking digg" and "rebuilding it from scratch" that killed it in the first place.
Homeopathy!
RethinkDigg.com
81–90 of 117 posts
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that was my first thought too. The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with. You end up throwing out whatever's good about the old property along with all the bad, and risk turning off the members of whatever user base you have left (who presumably stuck around because they saw something they liked in the old version). I suppose the population of Digg users is probab…
> The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with. For a complex system, like an OS or a browser. This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets. One man can write a half-decent one in a week. And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general.
> This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. It's a fairly complex transactional system.
> One man can write a half-decent one in a week.
No, one man can write something that resembles a social news site in a week, but building a good one that scales takes a bit longer. :)
> And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general.
That one I'll agree with. Their initial scaling problems should be fairly well understood.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#83I wonder if the name isn't tarnished enough to hold, whatever comes out next, back from being truly great? It just seems there's enough baggage for people to dismiss the new digg offhand if it isn't named something else. What do you guys think?
It's a dead and despised brand and they're going to have one hell of a time trying to resurrect it. I doubt they can.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#84Re: RethinkDigg.com
#85I think we're good on digg. It had it's run, arguably way overhyped. Let it go. :)
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#86>What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks. Famous last words. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
The project I'm working on now is at a point where it's either spend a HUGE amount of time refactoring and fixing everything or just start over. We can't just continue adding on features with the state the code is in. The question is, which will be faster? Right now, it's written to run on an old OS, with old versions of old languages. We absolutely HAVE to update this stuff as it's just stupid to continue programmin…
"We absolutely HAVE to update this stuff as it's just stupid to continue programming in the dark ages"
There might also be security issues. I've found that's sometimes a good rationale - if I've got code that will only work in PHP 4.1, and it's gotta work for the next 5 years, probably rewriting ('wholesale refactoring') is a much more prudent choice, even though it's "a complete rewrite". There will be no security patches for the underlying language - building on a platform with known and 'never-will-be-fixed' security holes isn't a good long-term strategy.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#87>What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks. Famous last words. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
One measly article does not a law constitute. There ARE counter-examples of successful systems re-built from scratch. The rewrite might have killed Netscape, for example, but without the rewrite from scratch not only would have Netscape died but there wouldn't be a Firefox or Mozilla Foundation now. (And I'd argue that it wasn't the rewrite that killed Netscape: the rewrite was necessary. What killed Netscape, and wo…
Brooks has repudiated that claim, though. See for example the first question at:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/350008/The_Grill_Fred...
Also, if we're going to link Joel articles from the decade before last, let me add this one which is merely ten years old, and elaborates the ideas from the previous: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html
All that said, I think there are things to be learned and gained from rewrites.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
No worries, if they run out of time, there's always https://github.com/reddit/
Funny because the only "real" difference between reddit and digg is the fact that reddit has an unlimited amount of categories. That and people seem(ed) more interested in the reddit categories than the comparable digg ones.
With digg, there are descriptions for each link (besides the title). Might seem like a minor thing, but I still miss it on reddit.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#89Kudos that they're the new team is getting user feedback. One thing that would be sad to loose is the API - it was one of the first back in 2007.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
One measly article does not a law constitute. There ARE counter-examples of successful systems re-built from scratch. The rewrite might have killed Netscape, for example, but without the rewrite from scratch not only would have Netscape died but there wouldn't be a Firefox or Mozilla Foundation now. (And I'd argue that it wasn't the rewrite that killed Netscape: the rewrite was necessary. What killed Netscape, and wo…
Brooks has repudiated that claim, though. See for example the first question at: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/350008/The_Grill_Fred... Also, if we're going to link Joel articles from the decade before last, let me add this one which is merely ten years old, and elaborates the ideas from the previous: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html All that said, I think there are things to be lear…
To extend on this, a later article talks about how the system is written on an "in-house language" ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html ) called wasabi.
> FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.
So to avoid starting from scratch they introduced a new language/compiler? Hrm... I question the scalability of this solution, what if every company decided to do this instead of biting the bullet and doing a rewrite?