On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, John Tobey wrote:
> Umm, well, not necessarily. Not if what I'm doing becomes what we're
> doing.
Do tell! What have you been doing?
> See http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$47 on the
> evils of total rewrites.
This article has been haunting me. My boss loves it. Suffice it to say
that I don't get the OK to rewrite nasty old code as often as I used to.
Perhaps for the best? Sometimes. Only sometimes. So, point taken, but I
don't consider it gospel. Mozilla has more problems than simply being a
costly rewrite.
I'm not here to try to tell everyone we're doing a rewrite - that's only
what I was told coming in the door. From the Perl 6 press release:
The next version of Perl is a chance for the language
developers to both rewrite the internals and externals of
Perl based on their experience from developing Perl 5, and
Chip Salzenbergs work with Topaz.
Note that we don't have to take that "chance," but I don't think we should
turn it down lightly. I suppose a reasonable question is: can we achieve
our goals without a rewrite? Can we succeed in integrating threading and
Unicode where the Perl5 developers have failed, without rewriting the
internals? I'm not qualified to say no, but I'd like to hear compelling
arguments before I'd believe a yes!
-sam
