Till Death do we Rewrite

It's been a while since it was written, but I recently read an interesting article from Joel Spolsky. It's from 2000, but it is of course still very relevant.

The article was about rewriting code, something he argues you should never do. It might be more fun and appealing to play devil's advocate, but I can't for this one. Joel is dead on here.

In my last job I was dealing with GUI code primarily. There were a few of us working on this section of the code, so it was by no means all my own work. One particular component of it was written by someone else who ended up moving on to another part of the project, so me and a few others inherited the work.

There came a time to expand on this component, and so I looked over what was done. It seemed somewhat awkwardly implemented, and I felt I could do a lot better if I started from scratch. There were events being raised and passed on 3 levels deep in the object hierarchy for no apparent reason, and the object structure itself seemed a bit awkward. It also got a bit slow under certain circumstances. Thus, I plowed ahead with a rewrite.

I started out strong. I had objects that correlated logically with what was being displayed on the screen. I had a simple structure that seemed a lot clearer and cleaner to me. It was working, and it seemed to even be faster. I was proud of what I had created (at least, at the time I was).

Then time went on and the GUI got more complicated. It sprouted the hairs that Joel talks of, and started getting slow for no apparent reason (but in different ways from the original implementation). All in all, the end result started looking a lot more like what had been there than I liked to admit.

The rewrite wasn't a total failure... it worked, and some of the details had definitely been improved, but at the cost of some new hairs that I would rather go back and fix. However, in retrospect, it would have been a much better idea to just dig in with the existing code and salvage what I could, refactoring what really needed improvement. I walked away with a valuable lesson though... whenever you want to rewrite code... don't. What is already there can work if you give it a chance. Refactor what doesn't work, and make the unclear sections more clear.

Learning to resist the urge to totally rewrite code is an important lesson I needed in order to become a better programmer.