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by wildmusings
3257 days ago
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A few things come to mind: - Windows is (mostly) a platform, not an end application. So you need... - Backwards compatibility. It is a pretty hard requirement, as one of the major selling point of Windows is that your existing stuff will keep working. Programs targeting 16-bit Windows from the early 90s still work on Windows 10 (though they recently removed the 16-bit subsystem from 64-bit Windows). I believe it's the same with Office document formats. You already have the code that handles all of the old APIs and functionality, so... - If it ain't broke don't fix it. The old code has been thoroughly battle tested. Obscure edge cases have been addressed. Bugs have been fixed over the course of many releases. There is no chance that your rewrite will avoid regressions, and you'll almost certainly introduce new bugs too. It's better to make necessary changes to the old code than to try to start from scratch. And... - It's a lot cheaper too. Joel Spolsky has a great blog post about rewrites: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... |
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