Florian HaasFeb 24

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!

Show threadStephen RosenFeb 24

@xahteiwi
In Python development, tox comes to mind. If you're not familiar, it's a script runner and environment manager -- it can install your project under multiple Python versions and run your tests.

I'm a user, not a maintainer.

Development fully stopped on version 3. Version 4 has a better CLI and I've seen new features ship faster since the full rewrite. Very quickly, v4 became noticeably better than v3.

Show threadFlorian Haas
@sirosen Good point. I do use tox (daily, indeed), and I had forgotten that the version 3→4 transition was a big rewrite.
Feb 24 at 12:03pmWeb