Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

5
  • 1
    I wrote a program a few years back. It was well-written. Then I made changes, always doing them well. Recently, I took a look at it, and it needed a rewrite. Sometimes the changes add up no matter what. Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 17:25
  • @David Thornley: I thought did a great job writing our own home-brewed Django-REST library. Then Piston came out. I'm deleting ours. There were some issues that I now see that I didn't totally understand. I think that happens a lot. We learn and the more we learn, the more our old code doesn't look so good any more. Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 18:10
  • 1
    I've had plenty of experiences with seeing my old code, and realizing what I hadn't understood then. This wasn't one of them: what I wrote was generally good, and my changes were generally good, and it slowly turned into something messy. Fortunately, its good basic structure made the rewrite relatively easy, and there was a lot I didn't have to touch, but rewrites are going to be needed for code that you touch enough, no matter how deftly. Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 18:43
  • I can't see how late binding can help in rewrite in the future, on the contrary - I can see how it might make refactoring tedious, difficult, error prone or plain impossible. Can someone explain how it could actually benefit you? Commented Jun 24, 2013 at 6:43
  • 1
    Change every word in this answer to "refactor" instead of "rewrite," and it is still valid. Probably more so. Commented Jun 24, 2013 at 15:52