Ovid is wondering about rewrite projects. It’s a frequent topic in software, and there’s no one answer that fits all situations.

One of the clearest opinions is from Joel Spolsky, who says rewrites are “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make”. His essay is seven years old, and in it, he takes Netscape to task for open sourcing Mozilla, and immediately throwing all the code away and rewriting it from scratch. Joel was right, and for a few years Mozilla was a festering wasteland of nothingness, wrapped up in abstractions, with an unhealthy dose of gratuitous complexity sprinkled on top. But this is open source, and open source projects have a habit of over-estimating the short term and under-estimating the long term. Adam Wiggins revisited the big Mozilla rewrite issue earlier this year when he said:

[W]hat Joel called a huge mistake turned into Firefox, which is the best thing that ever happened to the web, maybe even the best thing that’s ever happened to software in general. Some “mistake.”

What’s missing from the discussion is an idea from Brian Eno about the differences between the “small here” vs. the “big here”, and the “short now” vs. the “long now”. Capsule summary: we can either live in a “small here” (a great apartment in a crappy