Ask HN: How to Teach Refactoring?

1 pointfdeage2 comments

I am teaching programming to people with little to no programming experience. The course uses Python.

I find very difficult to provide the students with a general method of refactoring, or good examples.

Do you know of a small-ish (500-3000 lines) codebase example, that is both poorly written _on purpose_ and easy to understand?

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Refactoring is not a beginner skill. Ask Claude 3 or ChatGPT to give you a few examples with like 5-15 lines of code. But don't give them that until they have some experience.

Code isn't easy to understand for beginners. They need practice reading code.

Giving a beginner 1500 lines of code to refactor is ludicrous.

They have been programming for two months so they are not total beginners, they just have no notion of best practices. They already wrote two 300-line programs. The goal would be to have them read a codebase they didn't write, and optimize it.

I'm not looking for expert refactoring or sophisticated design patterns (they haven't even touched OOP), I just want to show them simple ways to improve their code.

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