No offense to the author, but going through one bad rewrite doesn't make anyone qualified to declare the idea unilaterally unsound.
Having gone through dozens of complete rewrites, I can agree that engineers too often want to start from scratch, because it seems easier to build it 'the right way' than continue to wrestle with old code. But that doesn't mean it's always the wrong idea.
I've seen it work brilliantly. I was over one rewrite where we were struggling to get the existing code base to adapt, so I pared off a couple of devs, rewrote the whole app in a few weeks (under a month) while the primary team continued to support the existing app. Maintenance became a breeze.
But I've seen the other side of it, too. I've seen total teardowns and chucking years of QA'd functionality go horribly wrong.
Having gone through dozens of complete rewrites, I can agree that engineers too often want to start from scratch, because it seems easier to build it 'the right way' than continue to wrestle with old code. But that doesn't mean it's always the wrong idea.
I've seen it work brilliantly. I was over one rewrite where we were struggling to get the existing code base to adapt, so I pared off a couple of devs, rewrote the whole app in a few weeks (under a month) while the primary team continued to support the existing app. Maintenance became a breeze.
But I've seen the other side of it, too. I've seen total teardowns and chucking years of QA'd functionality go horribly wrong.