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by hueving 3395 days ago
Doing a rewrite in a different language and justifying language choice by a successful outcome of the rewrite is grasping at straws to justify the language change.

Every time I've been involved in a rewrite, including ones using the same language before/after, the outcome has been good. The act of doing a full rewrite is where the benefit comes from, it's hard to separate that from a language switch.
2 comments
mightybyte 3395 days ago
It wasn't a rewrite. It was two separate web apps. Type safety categorically prevents classes of bugs that I've seen in real Javascript apps on multiple occasions. Haskell frontend apps that I worked on both before and after the JS app never suffered from that class of bug.
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pekk 3395 days ago
On a political level, it may often be easier to justify a rewrite which switches languages to take advantage of bullet point features (promotional claims like 10x faster, totally secure, no more bugs, etc.) than it is to simply ask for time to do a rewrite, which will make many average managers start fantasizing about firing you. If you write a blog post afterward, that seems to make the company look good.
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