Refactoring driven development instead of complete rewrites

I happen to share Joel Spolsky's view on the question of whether it's worth it to rewrite from scratch. He goes into great detail to show that you'd be almost always better off to reuse and refactor as much as you can from an evolutionarily tried and mostly working solution.

He puts it as follows:
The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive.

He then goes on to analyze some of the most prominent issues that could lead the development team to consider a rewrite, and how to solve them without throwing away code.

Nevertheless, would you be surprised if I shared that, according to my limited information, some modules of a certain programming language refactoring tool go through regular rewriting from scratch? It seems that not all eat their own dog food.

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