On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Siddharta G <siddharta.li...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Refactoring just means changing the internals without adding/removing > functionality. The book is good, but refactoring can be applied in many > other contexts too. It has been happening long before the book came out. > The > big insight in the book is not the refactoring patterns themselves. The big > insight is that its possible to make fairly large changes using small steps > where the application does not break at any of the intermediate steps. It > changes your thinking from I need to rewrite & retest to go from A -> B, > now > its like how can I go there in small steps without breaking anything in the > middle. > > Unless you plan to keep rewriting your app everything a change comes along, > I do agree that a self respecting developer needs to know refactoring (the > concept, not the book) > > Refactoring myths - > > - If I write perfect code the first time, then I don't need to refactor: > Wrong! Requirements change, and then your perfect code is no longer > suitable, so you'll have to go in and change the design before you can > implement new functionality. Thats refactoring. > > - Refactoring means cleaning up bad code: Wrong! See above. > > - Refactoring is only for OO code: Wrong! You can refactor anything, even > imperative of functional programs. I have used refactoring (including some > patterns from the book) on C programs. > > - "I have not seen refactoring used on open source projects": Wrong! At > least on the django project refactoring occurs _very often_ to support new > functionality. When multiple database support was introduced, the ORM > design > (which only supported single database) was refactored without changing > existing functionality. After that the multi-database feature was added. > Django has a policy of having unit tests for _all_ functionality, just to > support easy refactoring. I'm pretty sure it happens in all large projects. > > - Refactoring is only for code. Wrong! We recently released a second > product > which sits along with our first one, and it required completely changing > the > architecture of the first one - we refactored the architecture to support > the new product over 3 months deploying small changes at a time. > Architecture changes, server configurations, database structure - > everything > was changed making small changes every week on a running production system > with no downtime - thats refactoring too. > That is re-architecting or re-designing depending on which side of the conference table you are - not re-factoring. > > -- > Siddharta > _______________________________________________ > BangPypers mailing list > BangPypers@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers > -- --Anand _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
