I’m shocked by how aggressive a lot of the comments in this thread have been. This is a well written article, regardless of where anyone stands on questions like whether to rewrite vs improve, build vs buy, etc.
Questions of systems design are anyway not answerable by appeal to a formal theory, at least not yet, so like most gray questions of life, they are not ones where one should take a fixed stand. There are too many unpredictable or emergent effects of an answer to such questions.
There's only one comment that addresses your point. The rest of the comments actually agree with the article.
Either way I'm more arguing against the plethora of endless informal exposes into design and design metaphors that I see on HN everyday. These things do little to move the field forward no matter how eloquently they're written. The endless flat circle continues to rotate.
Questions of systems design are anyway not answerable by appeal to a formal theory, at least not yet, so like most gray questions of life, they are not ones where one should take a fixed stand. There are too many unpredictable or emergent effects of an answer to such questions.