[switchbak]

Which is why I find folks that throw out Joel's article to be a little black and white. Like "never rewrite anything from scratch".

It takes many years to develop good intuition around this stuff though, so I appreciate that as a first approximation. It can get a little dogmatic amongst senior folks though.

[arnorhs]

When it comes to a whole application rewrite, I'm pretty certain you should at least be much closer to "never ever rewrite" than "in some cases rewriting makes sense"

If you are talking about refactoring or changing/replacing parts of a system - that's not the same thing. At least to me