Seldom a good idea. And faulty in so many ways. eg.<p><i>It's long been a tenet at the Schindler bitranch that when you find a block of code with several bugs, it's time to dump the whole file and write it again from scratch. It's faster than trying to squash all the bugs in your bug factory.</i><p>So now you've traded bugs you know about for bugs you know nothing about.<p>The real key isn't rewriting, it's refactoring. And in my opinion, should be done almost continually.
I do think that the necessity of what the article talks about varies from project to project - but it strikes close to home in reference to my current project.<p>I'm working for a client doing something like centralizing a whole lot of decentralized data for use within an industry - the project has been attempted by other people in the industry before, and failed horribly - I suspect because few businessmen understand the problem they're trying to solve (and "enterprise-ready code-monkeys" are a dime a dozen).<p>I'm lucky enough to have a client that understood that the first functional version of what we were developing was more or less a throwaway version. It helped us get a handle on the <i>exact details</i> of the problem, but couldn't last. I'm currently working on the third iteration of the application as a whole, and (not to toot my own horn but) we have a pretty impressive, stable app now.<p>If we wouldn't have done some major re-writing from the early versions, the app would be utter fucking hell to maintain or develop at this point. Since we did, the codebase is understandable, the architecture is correct for what we're trying to do, and maintenance is not much of a pain.
Hmm,<p>Actually, I suspect you need to redo a particular program design an infinite number of times to get it perfect. That said, if you are going to accomplish something, you need to hold onto that imperfect thing you just finished <i>at some point</i> and use it - or equivalently let go of the thing and let the company use it...<p>Unlike art, programmers can't get hung up on perfection. Rather than being <i>artists</i>, programmers are <i>artisans</i> (producing thing with perhaps beautiful craftmanship but still forced on the use of those things)