Martin Fowler > Quotes

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
― Martin Fowler

“I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“... parts of classic MVC don't really make sense for rich clients these days.”
― Martin Fowler

“A heuristic we follow is that whenever we feel the need to comment something, we write a method instead.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“Poorly designed code usually takes more code to do the same things, often because the code quite literally does the same thing in several places.”
― Martin Fowler

“You can Change Your Organization or Change Your Organization”
― Martin Fowler

“Now I'm a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“I've learned to always avoid saying "always".”
― Martin Fowler

“Life being what it is, you won't get your names right the first time. In this situation you may well be tempted to leave it—after all it's only a name. That is the work of the evil demon Obfuscatis; don't listen to him. If you see a badly named method, it is imperative that you change it. Remember your code is for a human first and a computer second. Humans need good names.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“In almost all cases, I’m opposed to setting aside time for refactoring. In my view refactoring is not an activity you set aside time to do. Refactoring is something you do all the time in little bursts.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“Other than when you are very close to a deadline, however, you should not put off refactoring because you haven’t got time. Experience with several projects has shown that a bout of refactoring results in increased productivity. Not having enough time usually is a sign that you need to do some refactoring.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“Code should be obvious: When someone needs to make a change, they should be able to find the code to be changed easily and to make the change quickly without introducing any errors. A healthy code base maximizes our productivity, allowing us to build more features for our users both faster and more cheaply. To keep code healthy, pay attention to what is getting between the programming team and that ideal, then refactor to get closer to the ideal. But the most important thing to learn from this example is the rhythm of refactoring. Whenever I’ve shown people how I refactor, they are surprised by how small my steps are, each step leaving the code in a working state that compiles and passes its tests. I was just as surprised myself when Kent Beck showed me how to do this in a hotel room in Detroit two decades ago. The key to effective refactoring is recognizing that you go faster when you take tiny steps, the code is never broken, and you can compose those small steps into substantial changes. Remember that—and the rest is silence.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“People sometimes ask me what length I look for in a method. To me length is not the issue. The key is the semantic distance between the method name and the method body. If extracting improves clarity, do it, even if the name is longer than the code you have extracted.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“[...in interaction diagrams], comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility.”
― Martin Fowler, UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language

“It's more than a little ironic that many of us preach safety first to our children, nieces, and nephews but in our roles as programmers scream for freedom, a hybrid of the Wild West gunslinger and teenage driver. Give us freedom, give us the resources, and watch us fly.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t distribute your objects!”
― Martin Fowler, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

“It reminds me of a statement Kent Beck often makes about himself: “I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.” Refactoring helps me be much more effective at writing robust code.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“I write them to improve my productivity as a programmer. Making the quality assurance department happy is just a side effect. Unit tests are highly localized. Each test class works within a single package. It tests the interfaces to other packages, but beyond that it assumes the rest just works.

Functional tests are a different animal. They are written to ensure the software as a whole works. They provide quality assurance to the customer and don't care about programmer productivity. They should be developed by a different team, one who delights in finding bugs.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“I’ve found that refactoring helps me write fast software. It slows the software in the short term while I’m refactoring, but it makes the software easier to tune during optimization. I end up well ahead.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“Parallel inheritance hierarchies is really a special case of shotgun surgery. In this case, every time you make a subclass of one class, you also have to make a subclass of another.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“A statement Kent Beck often makes about himself, "I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“If you have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it's doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the "what".”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“Architectural refactoring is hard, and we’re still ignorant of its full costs, but it isn’t impossible. Here the best”
― Martin Fowler, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

“The Addison-Wesley Signature Series: Martin Fowler' google it”
― martin fowler

“One of the problems with Domain Model is the interface with relational databases. In many ways this approach treats the relational database like a crazy aunt who’s shut up in an attic and whom nobody wants to talk about.”
― Martin Fowler, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

“Even so the program works. Is this not just an aesthetic judgment, a dislike of ugly code?”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“Use this advice to prod your thinking, but don't use it as a replacement for your thinking. In the end you have to make, and live with, the decisions yourself.”
― Martin Fowler, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture