TITLE: Refactoring as Curve Fitting AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: February 08, 2012 11:15 AM DESC: ----- BODY: Nathan Marz has written a nice article on what he calls suffering-oriented programming, a development style that places great value on "You Aren't Gonna Need It". It also has a guideline for when you should build something: you feel the pain of not having it. If it doesn't hurt yet, then you don't need it. As you might imagine, Marz reports that the most important characteristic of this style is a relentless focus on refactoring. In refactoring, we often speak of code smells. Suffering-oriented programmers operate within a different metaphor. They are waiting for their code to make their lives difficult, such as when the queues and workers in Marz's stream processing system became unworkable at a larger scale. We need someone like Kent Beck to coin a catchy phrase for this -- code owies, perhaps. I enjoyed the analogy Marz uses between refactoring and curve fitting:

"Making it beautiful" is where you use your design and abstraction skills to distill the problem space into simple abstractions that can be composed together. I view the development of beautiful abstractions as similar to statistical regression: you have a set of points on a graph (your use cases) and you're looking for the simplest curve that fits those points (a set of abstractions).

Do the simplest thing that would possibly work. Marz presents a very practical instantiation of agile development without the hype that accompanies some usages of the term. It is worth a read. -----