Arjen writes "Artima has had a conversation with Martin Fowler, one of the gurus on software development today. It consists of six parts. Parts one, two, three, and four are available now; the rest will appear the next weeks."
Developers love him; Managers hate him
by
dagg
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Martin Fowler's books that outline such things
as extreme programming and refactoring are tops
in my opinion. But in my experience, many
middle-tier and upper-level managers think that
such concepts are useless and timewasting.
Re:Developers love him; Managers hate him
by
Leeji
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Refactoring is often about injecting the last good idea you had into working code.
I've got to disagree with you on this one. Refactoring isn't about injecting good ideas into working code, it's about making sure that those new requirements you got last week didn't create spaghetti code. In a development world were you design from a static set of requirements, Refactoring really doesn't have much of a place. In that world, you have a valid point: if a developer can't do it right the firt time, round two won't be much better.
However, that's not the world I live in, and it's not the world that anybody I know lives in. Then again, I don't have friends at NASA. We live in a more realistic development world that changes reqirements after we've designed our framework. We live in a development world where the evolving system makes the customer reconsider their original decisions. Since you didn't design the system with these new requirements in mind, you're usually patching functionality on top of what you got.
Refactoring is about reviewing this patch-work to make sure that the code is written as though it were designed that way from the beginning.
Certain agile methodologies (especially XP) treat refactoring as a tenet. Customers never give you a complete spec, and you never want one. They give you "stories" that you implement quickly and minimally. You don't over-engineer to support infinite extensibility via Web Services and a plugin architecture (etc,) unless the story asks for it.
When your latest minimal implementation starts looking ugly or hacky (ie: 4 page switch statement) then you refactor until the code properly "expresses its intention."
You had some good points, but I think you are a little mistaken about when refactoring comes into play.
--
It all goes downhill from first post...
Funny to see old terminology being the 'new' thing
by
Junks+Jerzey
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Pick up any Forth book from the early 1980s and a major theme is that of properly factoring your code. I was always surprised that no one ever picked up on the term--until the last several years, that is.
Design Patterns
by
jtdubs
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Everyone all hopped up on Design Patterns that has any background in high-level programming needs to read:
Revenge of the Nerds, by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
Paul Graham is a Lisp guru, among other things. His perspective on "patterns" is quite in contrast to that of the XP fab four.
Specifically, I refer to this fabulous quote:
"If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one. We see this already begining to happen in the Python example, where we are in effect simulating the code that a compiler would generate to implement a lexical variable.
"This practice is not only common, but institutionalized. For example, in the OO world you hear a good deal about "patterns". I wonder if these patterns are not sometimes evidence of case (c), the human compiler, at work. When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough -- often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write."
Slashdot Mirror
Sex - Find It
Pick up any Forth book from the early 1980s and a major theme is that of properly factoring your code. I was always surprised that no one ever picked up on the term--until the last several years, that is.
Everyone all hopped up on Design Patterns that has any background in high-level programming needs to read:
:-)
Revenge of the Nerds, by Paul Graham
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
Paul Graham is a Lisp guru, among other things. His perspective on "patterns" is quite in contrast to that of the XP fab four.
Specifically, I refer to this fabulous quote:
"If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one. We see this already begining to happen in the Python example, where we are in effect simulating the code that a compiler would generate to implement a lexical variable.
"This practice is not only common, but institutionalized. For example, in the OO world you hear a good deal about "patterns". I wonder if these patterns are not sometimes evidence of case (c), the human compiler, at work. When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough -- often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write."
He's my hero.
Justin Dubs