Nobody Is Starting from Scratch

Reminds me of a joke where mankind got so technologically advanced that they were able to create man from a piece of ground. They contacted God and told him they reached his level since they can create a man from a piece of ground. God asked them to repeat the process and when they started to collect some ground he stopped them saying "no, not with my ground..."

As applied to software development...

Sooner or later every developer hits the situation where someone proposes "rewriting from scratch".

Probably 1 in 10 such situations have merit. Probably 1 in 10 of the merit ones will be successful.

Knowing if you are in the 10%, and the 1% is kinda the skill. For the 9% starting from scratch may have merit, but be unachievable for time or resource reasons. For the 90% it may sound like a good idea, but we'll keep selling (and developing) the old thing in the meantime so you never catch up.

But it's a good gig for developers. You can write code for ages without ever having to ship. I know of one rewrite that started in 2006, and they'll be switching over "any day now".

Of course a rewrite is possible. You only need to answer 2 questions; A) do you want it? B) can you afford it (in money and time?)

Incidentally I (successfully) did a rewrite once (albeit that it was to change platform.) But I stipulated that it would not be backwards compatible. Not the data. Not the UI. I insisted we, um, well, start from scratch ....

«If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe» - Carl Sagan

I’m pretty sure CS50 starts from Scratch.

To start from scratch, we need to start with big bang!