

Steve "spez" Huffman of Reddit on The Total Rewrite Decision - staunch
http://reddit.com/info/2h8kd/comments/c2h9ii

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run4yourlives
I don't get it. I can't seem to find any reason _why_ they wanted to rewrite
it, and that's interesting in and of itself.

Given the language change of the past, and now a complete re-write, neither of
which had any major impact on the end user, I'm wondering if we're not
witnessing some sort of infatuation with coding for the sake of coding over
there.

I can think of a myriad of reasons why one would want to re-write code, but
they're certainly not sharing theirs.

~~~
portLAN
> _the old code was essentially two years of hacks and cludges. The new
> version is much cleaner, and the new back-end is much more malleable. The
> idea is that once we get caught up with ourselves, the actual new stuff will
> come pretty quickly._

~~~
run4yourlives
>the old code was essentially two years of hacks and cludges.

That basically describes every piece of software ever written. It's not always
a justifiable excuse to re-write the codebase though.

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nostrademons
Chris's comment is interesting...

<http://reddit.com/info/2h8kd/comments/c2hccv>

So I guess Reddit is now on Pylons, using Mako as the templating engine.

~~~
damien
Yep, I'd say that's a pretty good choice. Pylons+Mako+SQLAlchemy makes an
excellent framework.

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brlewis
Raldi's comment is hilarious.

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palish
A rewrite only tastes sweet after a _long_ process of freaking out that you
just threw away all your code.

And since time is the most precious resource in a startup then rewriting is
the worst decision you could make, if that logic is correct.

However, Reddit isn't really a startup anymore, so they can probably afford
it.

~~~
jgamman
definitely, they may (should) be looking at what they will need back-end wise
for the next few years. if building on a dodgy base is too risky, you have to
build the better foundation. they're not a start-up anymore, it's a new set of
challenges

