Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-kth--9bd90b-So we can see: How many spread/en

So we can see: How many spreadsheet systems were made all by different companies, all without any benefit of understanding how it was done before? Yes it's true, the first spreadsheet written wasn't perfect. It probably only ran on certain kinds of computers, and it didn't do some things in the best possible way. So there were various reasons why certain people would want to rewrite parts of it. But if they had only to rewrite the parts that they really wanted to improve, that would have made for a lot less work. You may see how to make one aspect of a system better, you may not see how to make another aspect of the same system any better, in fact you might have a great deal of trouble doing it as well. Now if you could take the part that you like and redo only the part that you have an inspiration for, you could have a system that's better in all ways, with much less work than it now takes to write a completely new system. And we all know that a system can often benefit from being completely rewritten, but that's only if you can read the old one first.