Making Refactoring Sexy…
I’ve been gone from the M$ stack for quite a while – 2006 was the last time I was in .Net land. But recently, I’ve come back to it through one of my clients, and I have to say, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
Between lambda expressions, closures, and extension methods, C# is looking a whole lot like Ruby these days. And with Resharper, working with Visual Studio feels a whole lot like using IntelliJ.
But that’s where things get weird.
The client will buy Resharper licenses for any developers that want them, but I’m having a heck of a time showing people why Resharper is cool…
Why Resharper is Cool
Resharper is plugin for Visual Studio that adds refactoring support (among other things). The guys that wrote it also wrote IntelliJ the Java IDE that changed the way the Java world writes code and raised the bar for Java IDEs..
I learned how to refactor by pairing with people like Dan North, Matt Foemmel, and Charles Lowell and a bunch of other amazing ThoughtWorkers. We used IntelliJ. Every other week when they released a new version, we’d all pull it and as we wrote code, we’d find faster ways to do things and share them. Our language even evolved. We started talking to each other about inlining that variable, extracting that method, introducing a a field for that, etc. We started thinking and talking at the level not of individual code changes, but at the level where you’re stacking 5 or 6 refactorings on top of each other.
And that’s really what Refactoring is – a domain specific language for writing code.
Using this DSL, in a tool like Resharper, my personal coding speed is easily 2 times if not 3 or 4 times what it would be in the same language without it. And over and above that, even without it (say in Ruby) I still think in terms of chunks of work, refactorings.
So what’s the problem?
Despite the awesomeness of Resharper, despite pairing with me as I use refactorings to blaze through things that would have taken mounds of time otherwise, developers here fail to be impressed.
I’m not sure why.
Perhaps, the problem is that I haven’t tried teaching them the language, the Refactoring DSL. Every language has a barrier to entry that is greater than zero. And Refactoring is no exception.
Perhaps a series of brown bags on Refactoring / Resharper is the answer.
Perhaps I should think about how I might be able to use Where are your keys to teach them the DSL.
If you’ve found a way to teach people the love of refactoring, I’d love to hear it…
July 29th, 2010 at 6:35 am
You should just keep on doing what you do, preferably pairing with your colleagues. If none of them will eventually get it, then the problem is not the “how” you are showing them, it’s the “what”, and there is nothing that can be done to help them.
The first level are the “trivial” refactorings that simply save (a lot of) keystrokes. I don’t think it’s difficult for them to appreciate them. But when someone sees a simple refactoring create an opportunity for a new refactoring, he’ll start to get addicted. And when a series of simple refactorings create an opportunity to easily add behaviour/fix bugs (that have been pending as too difficult), you’re done.
It may be a long road, but what do you have to lose? If not anything else, you can keep on doing what you know to help yourself.