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Comment by eurasiantiger | Hacker News Reader

The writer does not understand or appreciate eXtreme Programming principles. They slam continuous refactoring, while continuous refactoring is THE thing that keeps your codebase from falling apart.

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90% of the time the refactored code is objectively worse than the code it replaces. Gmail's UI was refactored into one of those shiny SPA apps, and it's absolutely awful now. Type in the search box before it's loaded and your key strokes get jumbled or keys get ignored because 50mb of JS garbage is thrashing your i9 CPU. Old Gmail was 100x faster and didn't make my laptop sound like a spaceship.

Refactoring is a retention program for engineers that provides almost no customer value.

Counterpoint: how often do you have a lump of legacy code that no one wants to touch, and changes in that area become too scary? Refactoring can address parts of that, by adding tests and identifying use cases.

The Gmail UI change is not a good example since it is a UI refactor.

Engineers might not have any say on features that the product manager wants but impacts performance negatively.

It is not refactoring if it changes functionality.

I get the impression that they're using a different definition of refactoring. It would have read better to me if they had said restructuring.

Tomato, tomato.

Well except that refactoring has a specific description that rules out what the OP talks about.

Yes. The dictionary definition of refactoring is ”restructuring of source code without altering functionality”.

Agile, agile.

Et tu, scrumfall.

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