Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

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> Nowhere is it written that behavior in a system is strictly additive.

For a unit of the same identity to suddenly start doing something different is plain nonsensical, never mind the technical challenges that come with breaking behaviour that should scare anyone away from trying. Logically, a unit is additive until the unit are no longer used, at which point it can be eliminated.

> But the old tests disappear with the old code (when the feature toggle goes away).

Absolutely, but static analysis can easily determine that the tests being removed correspond with units being removed. If (TDD) tests are removed and the unit code isn't, something has gone wrong and your infrastructure should make this known.

You should reread “Refactoring”.

Refactors compose. In three months you can completely rearchitect a module without breaking it at any point in the process. That’s the promise of refactoring.

Functions don’t have an identity. There is no such thing. I don’t know who taught you that but they have broken you in the process. Renaming things is a refactoring. We don’t check the entire commit history to make sure that function name has never existed. Only that it hasn’t existed recently. There’s no identity.

One of the reasons to refactor is that the function has been lying about its responsibilities. So you extract steps out of it, create a new call path that fixes the discrepancy, migrate the call sites, delete the incorrect function, and then, if the function name was really good, you might wait a while and rename the new function to the old name. Each step makes sense if you’ve followed the entire process. If you haven’t been following along at all then you have absolutely no idea how things got here until you read the git history thoroughly, which some people can’t do, and others won’t do if they expect the code to be static.

> You should reread “Refactoring”.

With respect, you should reread the comment chain. You're clearly just repeating what has already been said.

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