iA / Dictionary / R / Refactoring

TEXT TO TEXT

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

Refactoring: Term beloved by young devs and most hated by seniors. Refactoring is “what experienced developers do without bringing it up explicitly. The opposite of refactoring is code rot. Once someone proposes to ‘refactor’ they really mean to say they want to rewrite it.” (Thijs van der Vossen). When we hear “refactoring” we hear ”big rewrite” and instinctively point to this classic text on the Netscape refactoring disaster: “It's important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have ‘more experience’. You're just going to make most of the old mistakes again and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.” Things You Should Never Do, Part I, by Joel Spolsky. Code needs to be structured and documented. However, great code is not necessarily neat and clean. “Web design is engineering” and a matter of compromise, not perfection.