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Legacy code and the future

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Monday, November 19 2001 @ 07:49 am EST

Be careful with the idea of *starting from scratch* and think about the Mozilla project for example. There's an interesting article about this subject from Joel Spolsky called *Things You Shoud Never Do*.

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted. It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

Don\'t worry

Authored by: Tony on Monday, November 19 2001 @ 01:54 pm EST

2.0 won\'t be an entire re-write. 1.3 moves us in the right direction. Many things are now taken care of by OO objects. What we are proposing for 2.0 is to make it as OO as possible...doing so doesn\'t necessarily mean rewriting a lot of code but, rather, moving function currently in libraries (ala lib-common.php) to objects. Same code, different file...just more modular.

Some things, on the other hand, will be completely rewritten because they aren\'t suiting the needs of the users. I can\'t give you specific examples off-hand but I will be once we get a stable 1.3 release out the door.

--Tony

---
The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Legacy code and the future

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Friday, November 30 2001 @ 05:20 pm EST

Well, the code of 2.0, which is far less
complex then a web browser-*censored*-
operating system, as was being
developed by Jason, was actually coming
along quite nicely and did not have any
serious flaws. I dunno about the new 2.0,
but as for the old one, I know it was a
complete rewrite and one that I thought
was well-deserved, turning the system
from a hacked together mess to a clean
system. Now what has been going on
from 1.1 forward is good steps, and I'm
sure they'll reach the same point
eventually.

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