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Comment by lutorm | Hacker News Reader

I think this is false thinking. The 737 is by now a very well tested airframe. Yes, you change some things and there are unexpected results, but the core is sound. Starting over on a completely new design, everything has to be debugged from scratch.

This reasoning reminds me of the tendency to argue "this code needs to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch" among software engineers. It's easy to see the flaws, but not so easy to all the things that have been fixed. See https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

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Please, no. This is not the same thing at all.

This is like taking your MySQL app and running it against MongoDB with a bunch of hacks to translate the SQL into mongo calls.

And then claiming you did all this so you could "avoid a rewrite".

Some architectural decisions are far reaching and leaky. This is not the ideal but it often is the ideal trade off. The alternative is decoupling to the nth degree resulting in a hunk of junk impossible to change that won't get off the ground.

I dont think its corelous (is that a word?). It's not really a lift and shift to new platform.

However the analogy to "rewrite all this" politics is good I think. Often you could walk into a building and say "all this needs to go" but truely the costs of doing so and starting from scratch are hidden in code and engineering design that's survived a trial period.

No matter how nice and neat everything might look, that's only because it doesn't yet account for 10,000 other edge cases you're not able to simultaneously consider...a system as complex as a commercial plane is still going to care about these.

Exactly.

Changing the position of the engines means it's no longer the same 'tried and tested airframe'.

Engines were mounted to make a stable configuration inherently unstable in not so uncommon circumstances. The pitch was used to control the the most critical axis of the plane - something done normally with the rudder. This gave an automated system the authority to override the pilot with a wide margin. The behavior of the plane differs wildly from the old 737 as soon as the surprising narrow corridor of normal flight situation is exceeded.

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