Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 02/28/2013 02:30 AM, Adam Spiers wrote:
> I don't follow your logic here at all.  Being large and complex
> doesn't rule it out from being a starting point.  If it *wasn't*
> large, there wouldn't be as much to gain from starting with it
> vs. starting from scratch.

You make two rather big assumptions -- first, that writing a big application 
from scratch is difficult (for a highly-skilled team, it's not necessarily). 
Second, that starting from scratch is necessarily a bad thing.

In fact, starting afresh can be very desirable.  It's not actually "from 
scratch" because this team has huge amounts of knowhow from their years of 
experience, but because they are writing a completely new codebase, they do not 
have to be constrained by historical mistakes or backwards compatibility.  They 
have a great opportunity to make new architectural and design choices.

Building on top of other people's code is a good thing only if that code really 
supports what you want to do -- and there's probably more than a few free 
software projects that have had cause to regret deriving from an existing code 
base which in the long run turned out to not really be suitable.