On 26/11/12 17:27, Craig Sanders wrote:
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 05:09:28PM +1100, Jason White wrote:
Complex GUIs tend to come hand in hand with millions of lines of code and a system that becomes hard to work with when problems arise.
gnome also suffers greatly from CADT http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
it's always more fun to rewrite from scratch than to do boring stuff like fix bugs, even though that probably means throwing out years worth of bug fixes and usability improvements.
after all, why bother fixing an old half-arsed incomplete implementation when you can write a brand new half-arsed incomplete implementation?
But as Zawinski says: "That's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun" There's more to it than that though. Sometimes fixing hard bugs isn't possible without changing the underlying system a lot, which will inevitably create some new less-hard-to-fix bugs.(Although those ones shouldn't require major rewrites of the underlying system to fix, so in the end you move forwards)