Indeed. And, to be clear, I don't think rewrites are always wrong. I just think they are very, very dangerous, and need to be treated as such. I wrote about a successful rewrite I presided over in this essay, "Shipping the Second System". But anyone who was on my team when we did that rewrite will tell you: we were far from optimistic about it. We only did it after exhausting ALL other options, and it was a risk-managed project all the way through.
> “the second system is the most dangerous one a man ever designs”
Never thought about it that way. Feature creep and aversions to what you thought went wrong from the last time get tested here.
> So, all in all, we did several “upgrades to stable” that were actually bleeding edge upgrades in disguise.
I can relate. Being burned by certain upgrades can push one to veer on the side of caution even if the previous version had bugs. Software is never finished as they say.
https://amontalenti.com/2019/04/03/shipping-the-second-syste...