Martin Fowler: Code

Martin Fowler is British programmer. Explore interesting quotes on code.
Martin Fowler: 36   quotes 1   like

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

Martin Fowler

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

Fools , Understanding

“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

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 7

Way

“Steve Mellor and I independently came up with a characterization of the three modes in which people use the UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language. By far the most common of the three, at least to my biased eye, is UML as sketch. In this usage, developers use the UML to help communicate some aspects of a system. As with blueprints, you can use sketches in a forward-engineering or reverse-engineering direction. Forward engineering draws a UML diagram before you write code, while reverse engineering builds a UML diagram from existing code in order to help understand it.”

Martin Fowler

Source: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, 2004, p. 2

People , Communication , Understanding , Help

“Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a 'refactoring') does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it's less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.”

Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler at refactoring.com as cited in: Lawrence Bernstein, C. M. Yuhas (2005) Trustworthy Systems Through Quantitative Software Engineering. p. 266

Behavior , Change , Chance , Heart

“When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.”

Martin Fowler

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 88

Feeling