The thought popped up into my mind a while ago, that there is actually a striking similarity between refactoring and performance optimization.
Sometimes when I’m trying to get my head around something complex, I suddenly feel overwhelmed and my head starts to feel like its about to explode. I realize that there are at least a dozen cases which I’ve failed to consider so far. All the thoughts I was trying to keep track of just runs off in every possible direction and I can’t chase them all. Dispair overwhelmes me. Then I have to close my eyes, take a deep breath, hold it for a second, and let it go slowly. Then start over, think it through one more time.
I just wanted to describe what for me became an “eye-opener” regarding Test-Driven Development; that when you remove duplication, you should look for not only duplication of logic, but also duplication of data.
When I read Ron Jeffries Soduko articles, I was wondering why he was writing such sloppy unit tests. He didn’t seem to test even half of the code he wrote. A short email conversation later I had realized that he of course wasn’t sloppy, but rather just much more clever than I was (not that surprising, really). 