Perl 5 was a complete rewrite of Perl 4. Great success.
Git was a rewrite of BitKeeper. Great success.
BIND 9 was a rewrite of BIND 8. Significant improvement.
In 2002 MediaWiki was created as a complete rewrite of the previous software that Wikipedia was running. Astounding success.
Mozilla is a famous rewrite disaster. I have my opinions on it, but this is not the place for that.
PHP 3 was a rewrite of PHP 2. I hate to say good things about PHP, but that rewrite has not been bad for PHP.
Project Xanadu went through a rewrite. This seems to have been a bad thing.
vBulletin only became popular after a version 2 rewrite.
Zope 3 is a rewrite of Zope 2. It does not seem to be a success.
I generated this list by taking the first two off of the top of my head, then I went to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_%28programming%29 and clicked through to the links to all of the listed projects. If a quick scan for "rewrite" followed by information about how good it was gave me an opinion, I added it to the list.
Other than the obvious effects of survivorship bias, this should be relatively unbiased. From this it doesn't seem that rewrites are necessarily a bad thing.
Incidentally in my personal experience I've been involved with a number of rewrites. Most succeeded. I've seen a number of other rewrites from a distance. Most failed. I consider this mostly luck.
Judging from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu there is a possibility that, had they not chosen to rewrite their prototype, they might have released something years before they actually did.
I also have the sense that this project suffered a lot from the desire to try to be perfect, and hence failing to be good.
Git was a rewrite of BitKeeper. Great success.
BIND 9 was a rewrite of BIND 8. Significant improvement.
In 2002 MediaWiki was created as a complete rewrite of the previous software that Wikipedia was running. Astounding success.
Mozilla is a famous rewrite disaster. I have my opinions on it, but this is not the place for that.
PHP 3 was a rewrite of PHP 2. I hate to say good things about PHP, but that rewrite has not been bad for PHP.
Project Xanadu went through a rewrite. This seems to have been a bad thing.
vBulletin only became popular after a version 2 rewrite.
Zope 3 is a rewrite of Zope 2. It does not seem to be a success.
I generated this list by taking the first two off of the top of my head, then I went to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_%28programming%29 and clicked through to the links to all of the listed projects. If a quick scan for "rewrite" followed by information about how good it was gave me an opinion, I added it to the list.
Other than the obvious effects of survivorship bias, this should be relatively unbiased. From this it doesn't seem that rewrites are necessarily a bad thing.
Incidentally in my personal experience I've been involved with a number of rewrites. Most succeeded. I've seen a number of other rewrites from a distance. Most failed. I consider this mostly luck.