During many years, many forum members asked about new forum software, Epochtalk that was announced to stop its development weeks ago; or to upgrade the SMF forum software to a newest version.
Theymos replied in
this post and perhaps in other posts (I will quote them here too if I find them).
The things blocking a transition from the current software to the new software are:
- There hasn't been enough testing. I think that immediately after transition, a variety of small missed features, bugs, and performance issues would crop up. As a result, if the transition happened now (which is technically possible!), I'd expect the post-transition user experience to be poor for months while these things are fixed, which I don't want.
- I am the only bitcointalk.org sysadmin and on-demand programmer, and I'm used to the current software. Furthermore, I need to frequently make changes to the current software, but each change I make might require alterations to Epochtalk, which is problematic.
- The current PHP software, while ugly and sub-optimal in many ways, performs well, especially since I have extensively modified the backend to add features and improve performance. So I don't feel much urgency.
- The data-transition procedure still has a few known minor bugs.
This post possibly made many people disappointed years ago as same as latest announcement on stop of Epochtalk development, but there are some insights about programming here.
Today I read
Things you should never do.[url] In this writing, Joel Spolsky shared some insights and warning to newbie developers. I think this writing can support theymos' opinion above.
- It’s harder to read code than to write it.
- It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time.
- They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.