[bradleyjg]

That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it.

No, it was always the other way around. Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything because reading and understanding an existing codebase was always harder than writing some greenfield thing with a “modern language” or “modern libraries” or “modern idioms.” So they’d go and do that and end up with 100x the bugs.

[lelanthran]

> Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything

You are comparing writing something with rewriting something. You don't know what the difference is?

[layer8]

How is that “no” and “the other way around”? The desire to rewrite comes from the ease with which one can critique existing code for being “too hard” to understand.

[ffsm8]

You can't generalize that statement.

There is a very valid reason why the Creator of erlang back in the day said something along the line of "you need to iteratively remake your software, improving it each time"

As your knowledge about a topic grows, your initial mistaken implementation may become more and more obvious, and it may even mean a full rewrite.

But yes, a person which instantly says "rewrite" before they understood the software is likely very inexperienced and has only worked with greenfield projects with few contributers (likely only themselves) before.