Programming

13405 readers

3 users here now

All things programming and coding related. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

Hexorg@beehaw.org

remington@beehaw.org

Is it better to start from scratch rather than refactoring? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org to c/programming@beehaw.org

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Refactoring gets really bad reviews, but from where I'm sitting as a hobby programmer in relative ignorance it seems like it should be easier, because you could potentially reuse a lot of code. Can someone break it down for me?

I'm thinking of a situation where the code is ugly but still legible here. I completely understand that actual reverse engineering is harder than coding on a blank slate.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How long is a piece of string?

Rebuilding always takes a lot longer than you think. Refactoring always takes a lot longer than you think. I’ve been involved in failures and successes doing either.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

In a way you're right - someone else already mentioned the uncommon-but-plausible situation where the original edge cases are no longer possible and don't need to be handled. Most engineering has "fat tails", where the rare exceptions are actually pretty common. The thing is, "it depends" doesn't convey very much. Do you have some examples you could add, maybe?

[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 2 points 2 days ago

Unfortunately the work I’ve been involved in is all in a commercial setting and I don’t think it would behoove me to talk too much about it. One was a major replatforming of an enormous, global education platform. That succeeded but took 6 years, not 3. I’ve gone through major engine changes in various game studios; one of which was built from scratch, one which was kept up to date and had original GameCube code in it by the time we gave up on it and I’m in the middle of one right now, building a new platform for another education platform and refactoring a large VR platform. I wish I could detect a pattern of success - the only association I can find is with “patience”.