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I agree, I just think your initial statement was a bit extreme.

Yeah, on a re-read, my comment is too sure of itself. Never say never! But while there are always edge cases, IMO code rewriting is something that is almost never worth it. Especially a maintainability rewrite just for the sake of maintainability.

I'm so sick of hearing this tripe. Rewriting code is almost always a good idea because after you re-write it, you have some snowball's chance in hell of understanding it.

Oh, but Jeff Attwood said . . . Whatever. And then Jeff Atwood said something very different.

Blah, blah, blah.

If the engineer that wrote the code isn't at the company anymore, and no one really gets it now, rewrite it. At least you will have some chance of understanding the new bugs instead of failing to understand the old bugs (and there are bugs in that old code that you, for whatever reason can't read.)

Rewrite. Always.

Are you trolling? This is one of the most wrong things I've ever read on HN. To take the most obvious point - how are you supposed to rewrite the code if you don't understand what it does?

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