[jholman]

Brooks has repudiated that claim, though. See for example the first question at: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/350008/The_Grill_Fred...

Also, if we're going to link Joel articles from the decade before last, let me add this one which is merely ten years old, and elaborates the ideas from the previous: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html

All that said, I think there are things to be learned and gained from rewrites.

[columbo]

To extend on this, a later article talks about how the system is written on an "in-house language" ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html ) called wasabi.

> FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.

So to avoid starting from scratch they introduced a new language/compiler? Hrm... I question the scalability of this solution, what if every company decided to do this instead of biting the bullet and doing a rewrite?

[tikhonj]

Advanced, functional programming and basic...

Not phrases that usually go together.