Theseus was the mythical king and founder of the ancient Greek city of Athens. The people of Athens greatly respected his ship and kept it in service

Ship Thesean Software

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2021-07-17 14:30:09

Theseus was the mythical king and founder of the ancient Greek city of Athens. The people of Athens greatly respected his ship and kept it in service for many years after his death. As the ship fell into disarray, parts of the ship were replaced until no original components remained. Was this the same ship that Theseus sailed? This question, and the more general question of whether or not an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same thing, is known as the Ship of Theseus Paradox. (I previously wrote about this and other "strange loops").

"Rewrites are not just inevitable. It's part of the job," says Jaana Dogan, Principal Engineer at AWS. But software rewrites are more like changing an airplane's parts midflight than replacing planks on a ship. As a result, standard advice has been to avoid complete rewrites, mostly stemming from Joel Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do, where he attributes Netscape's demise to a decision to rewrite.

The world has changed a lot since Netscape. Software is delivered through software as a service rather than licensed binaries. Many services run in the cloud rather than in a customer's data center. Service-oriented architectures provide stronger internal API boundaries that create smaller surfaces to reimplement. As a result, shipping Thesean software is significantly easier than before.