> From your remark, it sounds as if you consider "refactoring" to be almost a swear word, and something that should never happen. I just can't agree with that,

> From your remark, it sounds as if you consider "refactoring" to be almost a swear word, and something that should never happen. I just can't agree with that, even with code I've written myself I sometimes realize I did it wrong. Ha! Not really, in my career I think I am still "net negative" for lines of code; I once refactored a 100K line medical diagnostic program down to ~10K lines for instance. What is a swear word is people who use "refactoring" as an excuse to start dicking around with stuff that doesn't need to be fixed. Refactoring certainly has it's place, but needs to have a purpose: new feature set that requires the rework, performance, what have you. Too many developers just pick something that is working and "refactor" it ... then you end up with the same thing you started with, just "better" and with different bugs.