Dear Steven, It is in the subtle points he makes that I agree most.
For example, he is not arguing that we should never clean up code, rather that we should lower our expectations of good things to come and raise our expectation of problems. For example, while I worked on TaskMan I probably refactored it about six times, some parts more than others, but I never threw out the original code and started from scratch. I always started with the code as it was and began commenting, reorganizing, and so on in place, preserving all the logic intact but modifying its expression. The more times you have done this with a specific routine, the easier it is to do it again, but only if it is the same individual doing it. When we move programmers around from project to project, we lose this ability to easily refactor routines in place. When you refactor a program in the same language, you can do it gradually, preserving the logic. When you rewrite it in a new language you cannot do it piecemeal, and the structure of the logic rarely translates as literally as it might at first seem because of the different execution and environment models. Of course, most people eager to rewrite have no intention of keeping the logic intact and their plans founder accordingly. I enjoyed this article and will use it in the VistA Programming session at the Boston meeting later this week. Thank you for calling our attention to it. Yours truly, Rick On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 07:20, steven mcphelan wrote: > I thought you might find this article interesting. > > http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
