The Problem: Rewrite Mania :: essays research papers

The Problem Rewrite warmthI have been noticing a certain trend in software product toward rewriting successful tools and standards. It seems that programmers always have the urge to make things better, which is dead understandable - after whole, this is the primary trait of the engineers mind (although I withal think that artistic creativity also enters in the mix). Why should things catch ones breath static? Surely progress is good, and if we just stayed in the same place, apply the same variates of tools with out improvement, then things would deteriorate and generally get pretty boring. Thats all very true, but what I am seeing is that in many cases we have tools which truly are "good enough" for what they are designed to do - TCP/IP allows us to build giant, interconnected networks, Apache lets us build flexible web servers, Perl lets us write incomprehensibly obfuscated code()... well, point being, these things work. Really, signally well. They are "good eno ugh", and moreover they are used everywhere. So alls well and good, right? Well, not exactly. The programmers add little bits and pieces here and there, make believe lots of bugs, and over time the code starts to look distinctly messy - and with the insights gained from this "first version" of the application (I dont mean V1.0, but rather the boilers suit codebase) the developers start to think about how it could be "done right". You k at one time, now they know how they should have done it. Fired with new zeal and enthusiasm, the developers jeopardize on a grand rewrite project, which will throw out all the old, stale, horrible, nasty untidy code, and construct reams of brand new, clean, designed, and, uh, buggy, incompatible, untested code. Oh well, itll be worth it ... right? So the new version will snuff it some things that worked with the old version - the benefits from the changes far outweigh a button of backward compatibility. In their minds, the de velopers are more focused on the cool aspects of the new version than they are on the fact that in the trustworthy world, millions of people are still using the old version. Eventually, then, the new version comes out, to grand fanfare. And a few people download it, try it... and it doesnt quite a work. This is perfectly normal, these things need time. So all the people who are caterpillar track large production systems with the old version just back forth for a while until the new version has been tested properly by, uh, person else.