That's all great for employees and managers, etc. but what about the stakeholders/investors/owners/endusers? Do they care if you would like to rewrite/fix code to get rid of something they have so much invested in? IOW, if it were your money, would you be so willing?? If so, then I guess it's nice to have money to burn...

>While I agree that good, working code is a valuable asset, let's keep in mind that lots of code out there in the field (in pretty much any programming language) is a mess and the best thing that could happen to it is to be thrown away. Alan Cooper talks about "scar tissue" that results from changes to code and points how inflexible the code can become.
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>Tamar
>>Often, programmers may be so enamored with the idea of learning a new language or platform (and getting paid to do so) that they will be happy to throw away lots of code to rewrite the entire application -- job security, you know?
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>>IT Managers at big companies often are much more motivated by the hype of "the new best thing" that they are willing to throw away lots of code (and the accumulated years of fine-tuning and debugging) to make certain they don't seem out of date or out of step.
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