The Netscape rewrite became Firefox.
Which still killed the Netscape brand and the sluggishness of that rewrite contributed to IE becoming dominant.
Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#12Wow, how long did it take to write this article, given the news of Textmate 2 going open source is only hours old? If I was cynical, I'd be guessing that the topical headline was a fairly shameless attempt to gain attention from website aggregators. On the subject of rewrites, with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to point out when it was a bad idea. But clearly it doesn't always have to be that way. After all, it…
Do you have any examples of Microsoft throwing away their codebase and starting fresh? I believe that is what Apple did with the OS9 to OSX transition. I can't think of too many examples where starting from scratch worked out though.
Windows NT? The Windows 95-98-Me series' kernel was thrown in the bin, replaced by the NT kernel when they released Windows XP.
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#13Except that TM2 is vastly superior in almost every way to the original, it might be 'too late' but it is a great editor.
Perhaps TM2 was possible as a series of small changes, maybe it wasn't. But I think we should be grateful for the time spent on TM2, and that it is now open source so we can learn from it, and maybe even make it even better.
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#14Wow, how long did it take to write this article, given the news of Textmate 2 going open source is only hours old? If I was cynical, I'd be guessing that the topical headline was a fairly shameless attempt to gain attention from website aggregators. On the subject of rewrites, with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to point out when it was a bad idea. But clearly it doesn't always have to be that way. After all, it…
I read the Textmate announcement, saw some great comments here and then decided to write the article instead of composing a comment. I didn't think the article would get any traction.
Agreed about the context being key. It always is. My point was more about adding incremental value to your customers with solutions to small problems rather than going after all their problems with one big release.
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#15Gotta call you out for a sensationalist headline and over-the-top one-sided article. People rewrite their codebases all the time, and quite often it's a very good idea.
In other words, this is a prototypical HN submission. Progblogging is so bad.
I've submitted like 3 articles to hacker news, I'm clearly not a pro.
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#16Except that TM2 is vastly superior in almost every way to the original, it might be 'too late' but it is a great editor. Perhaps TM2 was possible as a series of small changes, maybe it wasn't. But I think we should be grateful for the time spent on TM2, and that it is now open source so we can learn from it, and maybe even make it even better.
Maybe the real lesson here is, don't get in technical debt. Do it right from the start.
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#17Wow, how long did it take to write this article, given the news of Textmate 2 going open source is only hours old? If I was cynical, I'd be guessing that the topical headline was a fairly shameless attempt to gain attention from website aggregators. On the subject of rewrites, with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to point out when it was a bad idea. But clearly it doesn't always have to be that way. After all, it…
Do you have any examples of Microsoft throwing away their codebase and starting fresh? I believe that is what Apple did with the OS9 to OSX transition. I can't think of too many examples where starting from scratch worked out though.
From Joel's classic article:
"Microsoft almost made the same mistake, trying to rewrite Word for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug. Lucky for Microsoft, they had never stopped working on the old code base, so they had something to ship, making it merely a financial disaster, not a strategic one."
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#18Except that TM2 is vastly superior in almost every way to the original, it might be 'too late' but it is a great editor. Perhaps TM2 was possible as a series of small changes, maybe it wasn't. But I think we should be grateful for the time spent on TM2, and that it is now open source so we can learn from it, and maybe even make it even better.
Maybe the real lesson here is, don't get in technical debt. Do it right from the start.
If only it were that simple. The problem is that you don't know what the 'right way' is until you've done it once and discovered all of your the mistakes and pitfalls.
The temptation then becomes to start over and do it right after having learned your lesson. The problem with that is that often, in addition to taking to long too start over, you just end up making a whole new set of mistakes.
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#19Except that TM2 is vastly superior in almost every way to the original, it might be 'too late' but it is a great editor. Perhaps TM2 was possible as a series of small changes, maybe it wasn't. But I think we should be grateful for the time spent on TM2, and that it is now open source so we can learn from it, and maybe even make it even better.
The problem with the approach is that rewriting from scratch means you have a bunch of great features you can't possibly implement until you've re-coded your original feature-set.
It worked fine the first time, why chuck it out? Refactor it as you go along, for sure, but to toss out good work for some silly, non-existent ideal is fucking stupid. You should only resort to that if it's quicker and cheaper than trying to maintain the existing codebase.
Re: Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any examples of Microsoft throwing away their codebase and starting fresh? I believe that is what Apple did with the OS9 to OSX transition. I can't think of too many examples where starting from scratch worked out though.
Windows NT? The Windows 95-98-Me series' kernel was thrown in the bin, replaced by the NT kernel when they released Windows XP.
That's a successful version of the Pyramid story. NT had been developed alongside OT (or whatever the old tech kernel was called).
They wrote a new system in tandem with maintaining the old one and when it was mature enough, swapped out old for new. This pattern is very commonplace.