[nthj]

> I don't want to get into a big meta-meta flamewar here, but there are many people who do reject the merits of refactoring working code, for some definitions of "refactor", for some definitions of "working", and this has been the subject of many popular essays, most notably Spolsky et al.

Spolsky wrote against rewriting your software from scratch [1], but I couldn't find anything against refactoring, which are 2 very different things.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html