A reminder that Joel Spolky's essay being cited is about people rewriting ugly code that already works.
That nuance is important because successful companies do invest in rewrites when there's an architecture change because it's the cleanest most economical way to do it. My previous comment of Microsoft examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19245653
Another example is Google rewriting their early web crawlers of Python/Java into C++ to make them more efficiently scalable to thousands of machines. They also rewrote the frontend web server from C++ to Java.
But some rewrites also failed such as Evernote's rewrite to C#/WPF.
I think for the topic of "rewrites bad/good", it's better to list a bunch of famous real-world case studies and extract the common criteria that makes rewrites successful.
That nuance is important because successful companies do invest in rewrites when there's an architecture change because it's the cleanest most economical way to do it. My previous comment of Microsoft examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19245653
Another example is Google rewriting their early web crawlers of Python/Java into C++ to make them more efficiently scalable to thousands of machines. They also rewrote the frontend web server from C++ to Java.
But some rewrites also failed such as Evernote's rewrite to C#/WPF.
I think for the topic of "rewrites bad/good", it's better to list a bunch of famous real-world case studies and extract the common criteria that makes rewrites successful.