I actually was the one telling them not to rewrite, lol.

But the original code was a mess of matlab spaghetti, they couldn't find a way to hire for that. Not to mention turning it into a web service was already a big hack of java parsing a raw dump of matlab datastructures that nobody dared to touch.

I had to read the matlab code, and it tooks hours to decypher a few lines. Plus the language doesn't have great debugging and error handling capabilities and the tooling is quite terrible.

So rewriting to python won, and for once, I must say it was a good call.

Joel has since said that that he doesn't really agree with that advice anymore, at least not in the same way. Super annoying that it gets parroted over and over again as though it's the word of the lord.

I agree it shouldn't be parroted as though it's the word of the lord, like any advice it will be more or less applicable on specific situations. I've been on both sides of the let's redesign a thing plenty of times.

The balance is somewhere in the middle, it's valuable advice for what can go wrong when you don't think through the implications of the decision making process, understand how and why the system works the way it does, and what risks exist for what can go wrong with a big redesign. But like anything, if the risks are understood, then those risks can be accepted, mitigated, or rejected if appropriate, or provide guidance on why the redesign investment isn't worth the associated risks.