Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

["Przemysław Wojnowski" <esperanto@cumego.com>]

W dniu 2015-10-14 12:56, Tassilo Horn napisał(a):
>> Refactorings that increase maintainability (like this one) are very
>> useful to other developers.
>> 
>> Such changes, even small, accumulate towards something that can be
>> called a "maintainable system".  In (wannabe) healthy systems it is
>> everyday practice.
> 
> OTOH, they reduce the helpfulness version control offers to new and old
> developers.  I.e., it's good when "git blame" shows you the last 
> changes
> which actually changed the code, and switching "char const *" to "const
> char *" or vice versa are no real changes.
Why? In git you've got full file history. Besides the latest message 
gives
you nothing if it doesn't explain why something was changed. "Fixed the
issue" types of messages are basically useless.

Important is: write to a person in the future why you do what you do.

> In the same vein, it's of course good to have one consistent 
> indentation
> style, one consistent style of setting braces, one consistent style of
> naming variables, etc.
This is the first thing every team does after deciding that they want to
have a maintainable system. In teams that are not used to constant
refactoring, people always start with "But history!", "Don't fix what's 
not
broken!", etc. But after sometime they admit that it was a good change.
In theory it's scary, in practice it works.

In maintainable (readable, understandable) systems developers can read
many things from the code and don't have to look into VC history all
the time.