Front page | perl.module-authors |
Postings from November 2010
Hi Jarrod, On Monday 29 November 2010 06:03:54 Jarrod Overson wrote: > The inability for an IDE to help me thoroughly refactor code is the biggest > problem for me. > How do you feel any Perl IDE (or text editor for that matter) has an "inability" to refactor code? I have refactored a lot of Perl code using gvim with some customisations and some command-line tools and it was certainly doable. My process was that I first added tests, until the test coverage was satisfactory and then applied logical transformations while at each point making sure the production code passes all tests. See: http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/contributions/#xml-rss Perhaps not as easy as it could have been in an ideal world, but certainly doable. Are you by any chance referring to the automatic refactoring of such IDEs as Eclipse? In that case you should know that: 1. Refactoring tools are only available for a small number of languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring#Automated_code_refactoring 2. Even when they are available (as in the case of Eclipse), they only support a small subset of the refactorings mentioned in Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" book. 3. Some good people are working on http://padre.perlide.org/ with support for some refactoring courtesy of the PPI module. > With new code written with modern perl practices in mind, it's not as big > of a deal (though worse than other languages); with code written 5-10 > years ago though, it is a massive problem. Couple that with massive > dependency lists for some of the newer frameworks and you need to decide > whether or not a full rewrite from scratch on an up-to-date perl isn't the > cleaner option. From my experience, a complete rewrite was never the answer, and these essays agree with me: * http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html * http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html > > Once a full rewrite is on the table it's hard for a team and/or company to > not at least question whether or not perl is the "right" language to use > going forward. For almost every project i've worked on in the past several > years, it hasn't. Good perl programmers are hard to find and keep and the > bad ones write the code that eventually has to get rewritten. Isn't this the case for any other programming language? Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Why I Love Perl - http://shlom.in/joy-of-perl <rindolf> She's a hot chick. But she smokes. <go|dfish> She can smoke as long as she's smokin'. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .Thread Previous | Thread Next