Absolutely, more seriously
Every time I participated in a full rewrite it was a fail of medium to large proportions.
At my first job (ChaosMusic) we had a CDNOW like clone, we decided that at one point Microsoft Commerce Server was a mess and started doing this gigantic rewrite. The company eventually ran out of money before we managed to launch it. It was so cool, the UI was so much better, etc… But … launching it was impossible and eventually the company ran out of money, I left, and the rewrite was “lost” somehow which was fitting.
At my second job (Altiris, later on acquired by Symantec) they decided to rewrite the flagship product “Notification Server” between version 6 and 7. It was an insane engineering effort. I ran the “sustained engineering” team. Which was in charge of fixing bugs and supporting the actual product we were selling. More than half of the engineering team was sequestered away writing wonderful new bugs and a magical new platform that was going to solve all our pains we had with 6.
Needless to say this was a phenomenal failure of gigantic proportions, NS7 is now mostly dead, partly cause symantec killed it and partly cause it sucked.
So yeah…
#There is not going to be any rewriting of Discourse in X
Not going to happen, not on my watch.
Instead, we solve the problems our customers have, and build new components that make our life better introducing new tech as we need it.
We already have 3 JS rendering methods for various use cases, I do not see us adding a 4th any time soon.
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.