Programming is in many ways a conversation with a computer. You write code that tells the computer what to do, and it responds by doing exactly what you tell it. In time you close the gap between what you want it to do and what you tell it to do. Programming in this mode is all about saying exactly what you want. But there is another user of your source code. Someone will try to read your code in a few months’ time to make some changes. We easily forget that extra user of the code, yet that user is actually the most important. Who cares if the computer takes a few more cycles to compile something? It does matter if it takes a programmer a week to make a change that would have taken only an hour if she had understood your code.

The trouble is that when you are trying to get the program to work, you are not thinking about that future developer. It takes a change of rhythm to make changes that make the code easier to understand. Refactoring helps you to make your code more readable. When refactoring you have code that works but is not ideally structured. A little time spent refactoring can make the code better communicate its purpose. Programming in this mode is all about saying exactly what you mean.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Design & Programming.