Programming is not surgery
When I was first courting Dawn, she taught me two surgeons’ mottos: 
Get in, get done, get out
Minimize time, trash, and trauma
(”Trash”, here, is foreign material introduced into the body.)
I’ve been fond of repeating these, but I now realize the first one is bad advice for programmers. It should be:
Get in, get done, improve, get out
You see, while a surgeon is in there fixing one problem, she might also fix another one she discovers, but there’s not really any practice like refactoring. Maybe there ought to be, since your body is a gross kludge, but there isn’t.
The un-amended version of the motto puts too much weight on time and will almost certainly lead to a slow decay of the code.
The second motto, then, should be something like:
Minimize time and trauma,
but don’t forget to pick up any trash lying around
Not nearly so catchy.
November 12th, 2007 at 3:58 am
I tend to find that reading and refactoring is most effective before making a change, and I tend to do less refactoring once I have a new feature running and tested. (Get in, improve and get done, get out?)
And if the second motto implies any priority, I’d suggest: minimize trauma (don’t break other features), minimize trash (remove unused code/comments) and minimize time (for yourself and others, now and during “after-care”).
Thank you for the analogy.
November 22nd, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Get in, get right, get out?