Why do we fall into the rewrite trap?

So, my question is, if we as a community figured out — twenty years ago — that we should stop rewriting programs, why is it still commonly done today?

To figure out why we keep falling into the rewrite trap, I want to first step back through a few points in my history.

Yes, this situation is not ideal and, no, I am not advocating for anyone to manually FTP files for their production deploys. However, one thing that cannot be denied is that we were very productive. Granted, the Coldfusion code was old, but we were constantly improving it. There was never talk of a rewrite; instead, the code was improved, little by little, each time we worked on adding a feature or fixing a bug.

The results were clear: in my time at SignUpGenius I was able to see the company gain market share; with increased traffic, revenue, and even a buyout of a competitor.

The code wasn’t perfect — far from it, as any codebase would be after ten years — but if we had stopped to rewrite the whole thing we would have been dead in the water and the company would have suffered. Just like in Joel’s post, where Netscape took years to rewrite its already working code, rewriting code because Coldfusion was “dead” or “inferior” would…

Related posts:

I silently repeated these words as I sat with a few hundred other meditators in the main hall at Spirit Rock, an insight meditation center in West Marin. I’ve attended weekly women’s groups, several…

Azure provides a robust infrastructure for hosting and deploying applications, and Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) offer a flexible and scalable solution for running your applications in the cloud. In…

Can Crypto Mining Damage Laptop: Notebooks and mining cryptocurrencies don’t mix. Even a gaming notebook doesn’t have the hardware to run 24/7 as the activity demands. Using it as a mining rig is a…