A sustainable pace

Ok, it’s that ‘wine’ time of the evening. Miche is working late, I’ve eaten and am close to finishing off a nice bottle of Pinot Noir and my thoughts turn to people being excited by refactoring editors…

Firstly: I’ve never used a program that facilitated automated refactoring, so be gentle…

Right, so we can select a block of code, right click, select ’extract method’ and the editor does all of the cut, paste and argument passing/receiving fixups… Does that really take people more time to do manually than it does to let the editor do it? Like I said, I’ve not used these tools, but I’m guessing you need to tell it what to call the new method and I’m guessing that if it picks the argument names it probably gets them wrong or, at least, doesn’t improve on the names used at the call site that you’re refactoring from… So, isn’t this kinda stuff just fluff?

OK, I admit that an editor that helps you do the “extract method” refactoring is probably helping with one of the easier refactorings but even so, I kinda like to go through the process manually. I feel I learn more from it. It gives me points where I have to think about what I’m doing; rather than just selecting an option from a menu… Especially with the more invasive refactorings, like “put it in the right bloody place” and “remove pointless shit from multiple places”.

Maybe it’s just me.