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!

Show thread

Eli the Bearded

@xahteiwi

I used a file indexing tool on Macs in the 1990s. It could look inside my sit and cpt files
and then I could search by a filename and know what floppy to pull out. (Of course I named all my disks uniquely.) It crashed however if you pulled up index number 65536 on the screen. More than a screenful away from that, fine, just ±30 or so was at risk.

The complete rewrite fixed that, but made it less useful in other ways I can't recall. Anyway, put that down as a mixed result