Mastodawn

Serious question: as a user (not as a developer!), have you ever seen substantial improvement in a piece of a software from a ground-up rewrite?

In other words, have you ever used (but not co-developed) something where the developer(s) decided on stopping evolutionary work and instead embarked on a substantial rewrite, and the outcome as you saw it firsthand was a real improvement?

If so, please state your example. Please stick to personal experience, rather than hearsay. Thanks!

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Russell Keith-Magee Feb 24

@xahteiwi @carlton Django “magic removal” and newforms were both rewrites (and complete API redesigns) in the 2006-7 timeframe; both were wholesale replacements of older ORM and forms layers, respectively. Both immeasurably improved the user experience. (Admittedly, the “users” in that sense were Django users, who were developers - just not developers *of Django*; I *was* on the Django core team at the time, but I was also a user. Not sure if that meets your original criteria)

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Lily

@freakboy3742 @xahteiwi I think Django migrations might also count, replacing South. The main difference here is that South was a different package to Django, but they both had the same primary author.