Comment by compay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by compay | Hacker News Reader

Allan was saying "the end is in sight" 6 months ago.

http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/

This really reminds me of a series of blog posts by Chad Fowler, warning against the "big rewrite."

http://chadfowler.com/2006/12/27/the-big-rewrite

Now he says the next version will be out "maybe in 6 more months if everything goes right." In other words: "I have absolutely no idea when or if I'm ever going to finish it."

Which, of course, is fine. It's his project and he has every right to develop/mismanage it as he sees fit. But I got tired of waiting for basic things like split-window to be implemented and went back to vim a while ago. If 2.0 ever comes out I'll definitely check it out but for now I'm happily using vim.

I was actually reminded of a couple of aspects of the Duke Nukem Forever story - http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/

Duke Nukem Forever was self funded, so there was no commercial pressure to finish it. Since Allan is essentially a one-man shop I imagine the revenue from TextMate 1.0 has him set for life.

TextMate 1.0 was also a runaway hit, so the pressure for TextMate 2.0 to be an equally impressive release must be pretty intense.

Joel also wrote a pretty popular piece about big rewrites a decade ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

The title is "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"

...and his example is the Mozilla rewrite, which was wildly successful!

I'm not sure Netscape's investors would agree with you.

We had to re-write an application once quickly due to expiration of a licensing contract. We took the opportunity to refactor it heavily based on "big rewrite" ideas we had for years.

We finished the re-write in 6 weeks and the app was better architected and with new features.

Maybe it worked because it was a relatively small app, but it can be done.

Alan

I'll tell you why it's taking so long. Allan was hired by MacRabbit to create Espresso. ( http://macrabbit.com/espresso/ )

now after you download it and play for a while you will see that it's just an improved version of textmate or even it's textmate 2.0!!!!

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