It’s harder to read code than to write it

>When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

>You are throwing away your market leadership. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.

I think this is powerful, it's so magnetizing to follow the latest trends and consider everything preceding to be worthless or lesser, but ugly code/old code that works reliability is worth its weight in gold.

Related discussion about rewriting a legacy system by using the strangler pattern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22350664