Refactoring Monitair

Fun fact. Users don’t care how their code is factored. They just want their programs to do what they want. All the time. Programmers have a different perspective. They want code that looks nice and is easy to maintain. This means that you often have to revisit decisions made at the start of the project, and change things to make them better.

Real world architects don’t have this luxury. If half way through the construction of a building they find a better structure there is no-way they can reconstruct it. But programmers can. But it is not without its risks. Ages ago I found a Haiku that I rather liked. I think it went something like this:

Your code was ugly
I refactored it for you
It no longer works

Having said that, I’ve just spent a day re-factoring the Monitair software. Because it was ugly. And it seems to still work. Which is nice.