My impression is that rewrites are rarely worth the effort and it's better to improve on what you have, but this is the business economics perspective. It sounds to me like this is essentially a research project that kept growing? The authors have managed to keep their interest in the project by being able to rewrite the code while avoiding previously made architectural mistakes and having fun while doing it? Is this a fair take or am I underestimating the advantages? To be clear, I read the blog post and there have definitely been tangible advantages and they are still enjoying the language 6 years in so it looks like they made a good choice.
You seem to still be stuck on word usage, so I rewrote my comment to focus on what matters. Do you still disagree with what I write, if yes what do you disagree with?
> they didn't maintain interest in the code because they could use a fancy language, they did it because it was integral to answering questions that they were paid to investigate and that they've dedicated decades of their life to study.
Which they could have done in C++ as well since they already hade the code in C++, only it would have been a more painful process. But they could have rewrote the project in C++ as well for example, was this not a viable approach? If not, why? I believe there is a difference between research code and business code, where researchers have more freedom to choose languages that suit their projects rather than focusing on output.
You seem to still be stuck on word usage, so I rewrote my comment to focus on what matters. Do you still disagree with what I write, if yes what do you disagree with?
> they didn't maintain interest in the code because they could use a fancy language, they did it because it was integral to answering questions that they were paid to investigate and that they've dedicated decades of their life to study.
Which they could have done in C++ as well since they already hade the code in C++, only it would have been a more painful process. But they could have rewrote the project in C++ as well for example, was this not a viable approach? If not, why? I believe there is a difference between research code and business code, where researchers have more freedom to choose languages that suit their projects rather than focusing on output.