Refactoring is your friend / moving from 6.x to 9.x

[Bob Sneidar]

Not to put too fine a point on this, but ALL development environments suffer from this. Even if everything is done "right", future OS enhancements, new and improved plugins, LC feature enhancements and even developer enhancements can all lend themselves to the necessity for refactoring. 

It also begs the question what is meant by doing things right. With a fairly forgiving scripting environment like LC, right simply means, "compiles and runs without any errors." I moved projects from LC6 to LC9 with little difficulty. My problems revolved around app building, and I got through that fairly simply. 

What is missing here I think is what is great about developing in LC. The time it takes you to build an app is a fraction of the time it would have taken you in C variants or even Java, and the manpower needed is also dramatically reduced (and dare I say more cost effective to employ). It's a little like my boss telling me that I need to make more money getting customers to pay for IT services if I expect a raise. 

The elephant in the room however is that I have been saving them a boatload of money these 4 years, ever since I took over managing all their internal IT support allowing them to can their prior contractor (who was expensive and not nearly as responsive as we would have liked them to be). Not only that, but I have produced an in-house application used by all the IT technicians for generating professional looking customer forms onsite, as well as revamping all our internal forms and standardizing them. 

I could go on singing my own praises, but my point is, the assessment of profitability often depends largely on where you decide to plant your flag. I think from reading you email, that you might want to consider planting the flag a bit further back into your own territory. 

Bob S


> On Jan 3, 2019, at 10:12 , Curry Kenworthy via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> Likewise, in 2 years LC has required one heck of a lot of refactoring. That may be fine and dandy for people who write loose and sloppy code the first time and love rewriting everything, but it's not quite so cool for responsible, experienced coders who do it right the first time, and build reliable and optimized code to last as a smart value for their clients and customers. If you love retyping, redoing, and refactoring every 2 years, along with multiplied costs, then I totally understand the celebration. Personally I don't love that model. My ideal is just the opposite - smart code that is built to last and already optimized and reasonably well written from the start.