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Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its showtime public beta. At that place never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version iv.0, was released near three years agone. Iii 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 fleck smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long betwixt releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?

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

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

Netscape wasn't the offset visitor to brand this mistake. Borland made the same fault when they bought Arago and tried to get in into dBase for Windows, a doomed projection that took so long that Microsoft Access ate their luncheon, then they made it again in rewriting Quattro Pro from scratch and amazing people with how few features it had. Microsoft almost fabricated the aforementioned mistake, trying to rewrite Discussion for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug. Lucky for Microsoft, they had never stopped working on the one-time code base, then they had something to ship, making information technology simply a fiscal disaster, non a strategic one.

We're programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the kickoff matter they want to do when they go to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something 1000. Nosotros're not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting bloom beds.

There's a subtle reason that programmers ever desire to throw away the lawmaking and offset over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting ascertainment: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a key, fundamental constabulary of programming:

It's harder to read code than to write it.

This is why code reuse is so difficult. This is why everybody on your team has a dissimilar role they like to employ for splitting strings into arrays of strings. They write their own function considering it's easier and more fun than figuring out how the old office works.

Every bit a corollary of this precept, y'all tin can inquire almost whatever programmer today about the lawmaking they are working on. "It's a big hairy mess," they will tell you. "I'd like nothing improve than to throw it out and start over."

Why is it a mess?

"Well," they say, "look at this function. It is two pages long! None of this stuff belongs in there! I don't know what half of these API calls are for."

Earlier Borland'southward new spreadsheet for Windows shipped, Philippe Kahn, the colorful founder of Borland, was quoted a lot in the press bragging near how Quattro Pro would be much better than Microsoft Excel, considering it was written from scratch. All new source code! As if source lawmaking rusted.

The thought that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Erstwhile lawmaking has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it. Information technology doesn't larn bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be similar an sometime Dodge Dart, that rusts simply sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that's kind of gross if it'due south not fabricated out of all new material?

Back to that two folio function. Yes, I know, it'south just a uncomplicated part to brandish a window, but information technology has grown picayune hairs and stuff on information technology and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are problems fixes. I of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't accept Internet Explorer. Another i fixes that bug that occurs in depression retentiveness conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the center. That LoadLibrary phone call is ugly but it makes the code work on erstwhile versions of Windows 95.

Each of these bugs took weeks of existent-world usage earlier they were constitute. The developer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing information technology. If it's like a lot of bugs, the ready might be ane line of code, or it might even exist a couple of characters, but a lot of work and fourth dimension went into those two characters.

When you throw away lawmaking and get-go from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those nerveless bug fixes. Years of programming work.

Yous are throwing away your market leadership. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long fourth dimension in software years.

Yous are putting yourself in an extremely unsafe position where you will be shipping an sometime version of the code for several years, completely unable to make whatever strategic changes or react to new features that the market demands, because you don't have shippable lawmaking. Y'all might too just close for business for the duration.

You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.

Is there an culling? The consensus seems to exist that the old Netscape code base of operations was really bad. Well, it might have been bad, but, you know what? It worked pretty darn well on an awful lot of real globe figurer systems.

When programmers say that their code is a holy mess (as they always do), there are three kinds of things that are wrong with it.

Offset, there are architectural problems. The code is not factored correctly. The networking lawmaking is popping up its own dialog boxes from the middle of nowhere; this should take been handled in the UI code. These problems can be solved, one at a time, by advisedly moving code, refactoring, changing interfaces. They can exist washed by one programmer working carefully and checking in his changes all at in one case, so that nobody else is disrupted. Even adequately major architectural changes can be done without throwing abroad the lawmaking. On the Juno projection we spent several months rearchitecting at one indicate: only moving things around, cleaning them up, creating base of operations classes that made sense, and creating precipitous interfaces between the modules. Merely we did it advisedly, with our existing code base, and we didn't innovate new bugs or throw away working code.

A 2d reason programmers think that their code is a mess is that it is inefficient. The rendering lawmaking in Netscape was rumored to be slow. But this only affects a modest role of the project, which yous can optimize or fifty-fifty rewrite. Yous don't accept to rewrite the whole thing. When optimizing for speed, 1% of the piece of work gets you 99% of the bang.

Third, the code may be doggone ugly. One project I worked on actually had a data blazon chosen a FuckedString. Another projection had started out using the convention of starting member variables with an underscore, only after switched to the more standard "m_". So half the functions started with "_" and half with "m_", which looked ugly. Bluntly, this is the kind of thing you solve in five minutes with a macro in Emacs, not past starting from scratch.

It'southward of import to think that when y'all showtime from scratch at that place is admittedly no reason to believe that you are going to practise a ameliorate job than y'all did the first time. First of all, you probably don't even accept the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don't actually accept "more feel". Yous're just going to make most of the one-time mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren't in the original version.

The old mantra build one to throw abroad is dangerous when applied to large scale commercial applications. If you lot are writing code experimentally, you may desire to rip upwards the function y'all wrote last calendar week when y'all remember of a better algorithm. That's fine. You may want to refactor a class to make it easier to apply. That's fine, too. But throwing away the whole program is a dangerous folly, and if Netscape really had some developed supervision with software industry experience, they might not have shot themselves in the foot so badly.