Musings on refactoring

I happened to be across the refactoring in ruby book, which is the
adoption of the refactorings book by fowler from java into ruby. On
reading, one thing which strikes you is the fact that refactoring is persistent across languages and platforms. Java is verbose and allows various coding styles and idiosyncrasies which is evident why lot of java programmers churn
out code that is unnecessarily complex. The proliferation of IDEs has also encouraged this malpractice of creating not just sub-optimal but also unnecessarily complex code.

However, finding the same in ruby has traditionally been difficult as ruby, like its japanese inventor has been neat and concise in its apporach, allowing basically for a lot of bang for a small amount of code. However, as the community grows, there is an acute need to maintain the standards in ruby as well as the developer base is exploding exponentially in ruby. In my opinion, refactoring is a practice that every developer needs to apply and enforce amongst their team as a cardinal rule in programming. Applying this context in the updated refactorings book, I feel while using ruby the answers have become more to the point, but at the cost of grossly sloppy code. It could have better demonstrated in a language that is equally neat and offers variety like java. Python obviously springs into mind where at one place there is a C like procedural code and at the other end there are python experts proclaiming the use of pythonic code.

Having the same refactoring into another language feels alien for a while, but then it is a bliss to realize that same problem existed into another language as well, it was just that a learner like me got carried away in the syntactic differences.

At the end of the day, it is the learner who needs to decide what to and more importantly what not to include in the changes to be made in the codebase.