John Gilmore wrote: Refactoring as its two principal advocates have presented it is etc. etc.
Refactoring is restructuring code such that the end result is functionally identical with the original code, but with the aim of achieving a better code structure, nothing more. It is a well understood, generally accepted and extensively used technique in the wider world of software development. What counts as "better" can clearly vary from case to case and according to personal conviction, and there are certainly advocates of quite sophisticated techniques. Refactoring to patterns for example is obviously rather different to replacing common code with a macro (and replacing common code with a procedure is of course far from being the only simple and generally useful refactoring technique). Commonly accepted design patters however are something that all programmers could usefully be familiar with, and having tools which support implementation of such constructs is no disadvantage, once one is familiar with them and the basic concepts behind them. No doubt some people take such possibilities to extremes that we would not all feel are justifiable. To dismiss the whole concept with a silly term like "cargo cult" because of (I guess) one's personal dislike of some extremes is (amongst other things) to throw the baby out with the bath water. It is possible to make finer distinctions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
