This says, near the end, "Do not ever even attempt a big-bang rewrite", but aren't a LOT of legacy in-house projects completely blown out of the water by well-maintained libraries of popular, modern languages, that already exist? (In some cases these might be commercial solutions, but for which a business case could be made.)
I'm loath to give examples so as not to constrain your thinking, but, for example, imagine a bunch of hairy Perl had been built to crawl web sites as part of whatever they're doing, and it just so happens that these days curl or wget do more, and better, and less buggy, than everything they had built. (think of your own examples here, anything from machine vision to algabreic computation, whatever you want.)
In fact isn't this the case for lots and lots of domains?
For this reason I'm kind of surprised why the "big bang rewrite" is, written off so easily.
I'm loath to give examples so as not to constrain your thinking, but, for example, imagine a bunch of hairy Perl had been built to crawl web sites as part of whatever they're doing, and it just so happens that these days curl or wget do more, and better, and less buggy, than everything they had built. (think of your own examples here, anything from machine vision to algabreic computation, whatever you want.)
In fact isn't this the case for lots and lots of domains?
For this reason I'm kind of surprised why the "big bang rewrite" is, written off so easily.