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by anonzzzies 643 days ago
> But if you're starting from scratch, you've lost all the "little fixes" that go into making a car good.

This is also the reason massive software rewrites often fail; you rebuild the general gist quite fast, nice code, lovely interfaces etc but it will have a trillion bugs which come from decades of adding an exception here, adding one there etc. So now you have a beautiful albeit worthless product. And often these get scrapped: I know of some tax system rewrites from mainframe to modern code that costed 10s of millions and were scrapped, multiple times for this reason.

2 comments

Joel Spolsky has an excellent writeup on this principle, explaining why it led to Netscape dying: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
The VA has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars trying to rewrite their antiquated software.