[wredue]

>dev is the most expensive resource

This is not true. Ask Facebook, who have rewritten things multiple times explicitly because this is not true, but someone assumed it was

>maintain ability and first to market are usually more important

Maintainability and first to market are not trade offs for performance in most cases, no matter how much you want to propagate this ridiculous propaganda.

[arp242]

But the question is, would Facebook still be around if they didn't "just ship this turd lol"? I don't really have any insight in Facebook engineering over the years and it's a "what if" type of question that's essentially unanswerable, but the answer to that being "no" is very plausible.

And Facebook really does have unique(-ish) scalability problems, and I bet rewrites would have been inevitable even with the best possible engineering, because who can write an application to deal with a billion users (2012, currently 3 billion) right from the start? When Facebook launched in 2004 this was pretty much unheard of, and even in today it remains pretty rare (much less 2012).