Why would the austerity of current support hinder his lobbying efforts for his improved version? If compatibility is a problem, you can just run comments before flag day through the old code. Or write a converter.
You are thinking about HN as if it was just a piece of software. It isn't just a piece of software; it's also:
* an important piece of YC's infrastructure, so it doesn't have a normal dev team; some of the data going through HN is "hazmat".
* a demonstration of a new programming language Graham is ostensibly working on, which implies that doing things "the right way" is more important than on a typical project.
* in part a secret (the published HN code is not the code running on HN).
Comments
Why would the austerity of current support hinder his lobbying efforts for his improved version? If compatibility is a problem, you can just run comments before flag day through the old code. Or write a converter.
You are thinking about HN as if it was just a piece of software. It isn't just a piece of software; it's also:
* an important piece of YC's infrastructure, so it doesn't have a normal dev team; some of the data going through HN is "hazmat".
* a demonstration of a new programming language Graham is ostensibly working on, which implies that doing things "the right way" is more important than on a typical project.
* in part a secret (the published HN code is not the code running on HN).