Stop the Insanity

(Originally posted 2003.Jun.06 Fri; links may have expired.)

Some people very experienced in software development looked at my Extract Method refactoring example and wondered what was so unusual about doing that. One asked "Isn't this just obvious, and what any sane person would do?" Apparently not.

There are tons of "insane", unrefactored code in companies everywhere. Even in my own current XP-ish project, there are developers who sometimes write (or more likely copy-paste-modify) long methods with duplicate code, and they have more than five years of experience developing software.

For many people, it seems like their tolerance level for hard-to-read, hard-to-maintain code is high, possibly because their high intelligence lets them sort things out in their minds - at least when they're familiar with the code. If only they would sort it out in the code itself.

I imagine those "tolerant" people get irritated by us "intolerant" Extreme Programmers, who want the code to be so easy to read and enhance that it looks like it was easy to write. There's an old joke in programmers circles - "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read" - that is unfortunately too true.

If you really want to get insane code - long methods, lots of duplication - measure your programmer's productivity by counting lines of code. You'll get what you measure.