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> Adapting mature software to new circumstances tends to take more time and effort than writing new software from scratch. Software people don’t like to admit this, but the evidence is clear.

Software people love rewriting things. In most cases where I have to maintain an old project I would much rather rewrite it, but it's usually not in the budget.

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In my experience the re-write always takes much longer than expected. Sure you might be able to redo the core pieces to handle the new problem in X weeks, but then it's going to take another 4*X weeks to handle all the edge cases and make sure you're not breaking anything your clients/users have grown to depend on.

From another HN thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19245485

> The first 90% of the code takes the first 90% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.

And

> With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody

For sure. That's what I meant by "it's not in the budget". I would probably choose to rewrite most projects I work on, but I know it's completely unreasonable for most non-trivial projects. I just meant I naturally gravitate towards wanting to rewrite because clean slates are satisfying.

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