SupSuper, quote from article you mentioned, about Netscape.
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.
It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
From russian wikipaedia:
In Noverber, 1998 Netscape 5.0 has been stopped, and Netscape decided to start new project from scratch. Why?
So Netscape decided to start new browser from the scratch, based totally on opensource. They've founded informal group "Mozilla Organization" which was funded mailny by Netscape. This group had to be working on coordination on Netscape5 development, based on source code of Communicator. But using old, obsolete code led to big problems, so they decided to write it from scratch. New code was named "Mozilla", which was used for Netscape 6.
Article.
So famous Mozilla Firefox - is result of "rewriting from scratch" of Netscape Communicator. Nice result, I must say.
P.S.
When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
Sound like he wanted to put this code into frame and hang above his bed.
![Smiley :)](https://openxcom.org/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
Throwing old code doesn't mean throwing all that knowledge. At some point every long-living project goes through concept rework and refactoring, if it doesn't want to just die. New concept
must take into account every bug faced previously. That takes its time, yes, but it results in better flexability, moddability/modularity and better bug handling. Getting into position "I love that code because I spent years on written it, I know every bug of it" is static and counter-productive.
P.P.S.
I have my own experience in "rewriting from scratch". Not of a game project, though pretty complex (for banking). I'm not saying openxcom should be rewritten from scratch. That insane. Only data structures and engine itself should be rewritten at some point. When it would be impossible to add new features, or beat some of bugs, connected with xcom1 data structure.
P.P.P.S. I haven't answered
pmprog on every quoted line just because those statements was from having little knowledge of roots of those problems (north'n'west outer walls for example). And poor understanding of what I proposed. Maybe because my brief desctiption was not clear enough.