> The temptation to throw away all of your code - be it a prototype or a "grown" code base - arises often.
I want an editor plugin which allows me to mark sections of code as reviewed or "perfect" (depending on how honest I'm being). Then, when I'm tempted to rewrite everything, I can go through and mark what I think is good, and then focus on refactoring the rest until I think it is good as well.
I'm tempted to rewrite code because I lose track of what it's doing, or I've learned a lot since I wrote that old code and so I'm not sure if the old code is good anymore. It's not so much about rewriting the code as an exercise in getting familiar with the code I've already written. I want a tool to help me with this.
I would think a combination of git, unit tests, and comments would solve this problem?
Unit tests prove the code works as intended, and are basically examples of what the code is doing. Whether the code is actually "good" is a bit more subjective -- but tests give you the freedom to modify it without breaking it.
Checking into git frequently is also a way to give yourself some freedom. Commit at every milestone, like every time the next thing is "working". If you feel like refactoring, go for it -- you can reset back to working state in a few seconds.
And lastly, leave comments in. You can always clean it up before you push. You can even squash or interactively rebase your history so no one else sees the gory details how the hot dog was actually made.
The theory and the practice of unit tests are often different things. In theory you’ll make changes to the code, and the unit tests will show whether they had the intended effects.
In practice, because often the unit tests are mocking out all the classes they interact with (as is the recommended style for isolated tests) you’ll either have all the tests explode constantly because the interface being mocked has changed, or you’ll have tests that confidently tell you things are working despite the methods they call no longer existing.
If you could modularize code in such a way the sizable chunks could “just sit still!” then entire modules could be marked as perfect. But you wouldn’t have to since you wouldn’t naturally need to touch them (e.g. how many codebases are using a fork of core-utils, for example, … to exaggerate a conways law effect).
But unfortunately the modules don’t make themselves apparent at the start of the project. So it needs refactoring discipline.
I want an editor plugin which allows me to mark sections of code as reviewed or "perfect" (depending on how honest I'm being). Then, when I'm tempted to rewrite everything, I can go through and mark what I think is good, and then focus on refactoring the rest until I think it is good as well.
I'm tempted to rewrite code because I lose track of what it's doing, or I've learned a lot since I wrote that old code and so I'm not sure if the old code is good anymore. It's not so much about rewriting the code as an exercise in getting familiar with the code I've already written. I want a tool to help me with this.