Things You Should Never Do, Part 1

• The single worst strategic mistake a software company can make is to rewrite the code from scratch.
• It’s harder to read code than to write it.
  • This is why programmers always want to throw away the old code and start over. This truth makes them always think the old code is a mess.
• New code is never better than old code because the old code has been used.
• When you throw away code and starting from scratch, you are throwing away hard-earned knowledge.
• Reasons why code is a mess:
  • Architectural problems. This is solved with careful refactoring.
  • It’s inefficient. This is usually relegated to a small part of the project. So fix that. 1% or the work gets you 99% of the bang.
  • It’s ugly. Refactor it or rename things to make it pretty.
• When you start from scratch, you have no reason to believe that you’re going to do a better job than you did the first time.
• It’s fine to refactor and restructure parts of a program. But never throw away the whole thing if it’s actually useful.