David Stokes wrote: <begin extract> Refactoring is a standard part of programming which every decent programmer uses, even if they don't call it that. It's refactoring when you replace several instances of some piece of code with a macro, to use an Assembler example. </end extract>
and in this sense it is innocuous, even platitudinous, and certainly harmless. Refactoring as its two principal advocates have presented it is, however, something different. It emphasizes 'patterns' and the active recasting of code into them and, implicitly at least, only them. It is often presented as a panacea, the latest in a long sequence of them, each of which, in its turn, was to solve all of our problems. There is an aperçu embedded in the notion of refactoring, as there was, for example, in structured programming; but their reification into 'systems' complete with their own gurus, buzzwords, and bureaucracies, while perhaps inevitable, is at best deleterious. Several consulting firms, the usual suspects, are now offering 'webinars' in refactoring. So yes, cargo cults. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
