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The writer does not understand or appreciate eXtreme Programming principles. They slam continuous refactoring, while continuous refactoring is THE thing that ke
by eurasiantiger 6y ago
The writer does not understand or appreciate eXtreme Programming principles. They slam continuous refactoring, while continuous refactoring is THE thing that keeps your codebase from falling apart.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoI get the impression that they're using a different definition of refactoring. It would have read better to me if they had said restructuring.
- eurasiantiger 6y agoTomato, tomato.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoWell except that refactoring has a specific description that rules out what the OP talks about.
- eurasiantiger 6y agoYes. The dictionary definition of refactoring is ”restructuring of source code without altering functionality”.
- HowTheStoryEnds 6y agoAgile, agile. Et tu, scrumfall.
- 0xy 6y ago90% of the time the refactored code is objectively worse than the code it replaces. Gmail's UI was refactored into one of those shiny SPA apps, and it's absolutely awful now. Type in the search box before it's loaded and your key strokes get jumbled or keys get ignored because 50mb of JS garbage is thrashing your i9 CPU. Old Gmail was 100x faster and didn't make my laptop sound like a spaceship. Refactoring is a retention program for engineers that provides almost no customer value.
- throwaway346434 6y agoCounterpoint: how often do you have a lump of legacy code that no one wants to touch, and changes in that area become too scary? Refactoring can address parts of that, by adding tests and identifying use cases.
- arvinsim 6y agoThe Gmail UI change is not a good example since it is a UI refactor. Engineers might not have any say on features that the product manager wants but impacts performance negatively.
- eurasiantiger 6y agoIt is not refactoring if it changes functionality.