I find this fascinating. In a Salon interview on his new book, "Dreaming in Code", Scott Rosenberg says:

And programmers, as I quote Larry Constantine in my book, programmers are programmers because they like to code — given a choice between learning someone else’s code and just sitting down and writing their own, they will always do the latter.

Jonathan Rentzsch doesn't like that at all, and retorts:

Rosenberg is wrong. Programmers don’t like coding, they like problem solving

Further down, he says this though:

While there are times we want to ground-up rewrite due to architectural considerations (new runtime, new language, major new functionality) in my experience the common case for wanting to rewrite is to understand.

The thing is, they're both right, and they are talking right past each other. Developers rewrite far more often than Rentzsch would like to think, and not always for the good reasons he speaks of. Consider: How many systems have migrated from language A to language B (pick any A and B you like) over the last 20 years, simply because B was "cool", and the developers really, really wanted to get B on their resumes? It's not always like that, but it's not always as clean as Rentzsch would have us believe, either.

Technorati Tags: development, developers