Greg A. Woods writes:

>> > Seriously speaking all complex software should be re-written from
>> > scratch as often as humanly and economically possible.  And maybe even
>> > more often than that.
>> 
>> Wow. The appropriate response in a technical forum would be to ignore a
>> statement like this, or give a patient and reasoned reply on the subject.
>
>A decent number of computer scientists and indeed even many real
>engineers will agree strongly with my first statement above.  How many

just for the records... you might be referring to Brooks' "build one
to throw it away" (prototype) thing, issued in his legendary "The
mythical man month" book.  However, this has been shown to be a rather
misleading and practically nonworking approach, and Brooks has recognized
it as such in his 1995 re-edition of "the mythical man month".

>people wouldn't like to re-build a large building, bridge, or dam, again
>from scratch after learning from all the mistakes (tiny or otherwise)
>made in the original project?

This is often impossible, and even more, very uneconomical, though.
It also promotes a certain carelessness in building ("well, we can
do it properly in the next version".)  The result of such thinking
can be observed easily on vintage open-source projects.

--mkb