I recently posted about Git and how it has changed my development style in only a week of using it. After discussing this with a couple of people, I believe I have a better way of articulating the underlying problem.
Fundamentally, it comes down to what I have been calling “timid edits”.
We’ve all been there. There’s some nasty piece of code that you just can’t get to work right. There’s some edge-case that you realize you forgot to deal with and you’re trying to wedge in the fix. You change this, you change that. You exert tremendous effort trying to bend your existing code to the right shape, but to no avail. In the end, after god knows how long, you just say screw it and rewrite the whole function.
Why did it take so long to reach that point? Why didn’t you just rewrite the offending code-block when you realized there was some flaw? I think sometimes we mislead ourselves into thinking that code that ‘almost-works’ is somehow actually ‘close’ to the actual solution when we are in fact at a dead end. Similarly, I think that we feel like deleting code will take us further away from our goal and perhaps we feel as if we can’t get back.
These timid edits don’t only affect debugging, but also get in the way of refactoring. “Our API works, why rewrite it?” “My class hierarchy works, why change it?” Because of our timidity when it comes to rewriting code we fail to reap the possible benefits like efficiency, clarity, or maintainability.
In order to deal with this issue—timid edits—we have to have confidence in our understanding of the problem itself, and have confidence in our ability to recreate its solution.
We have tools that can help us find our way back, when we go wandering away from the solution. These tools can embolden us. I have recently begun using Git for exactly this purpose. I keep very frequent way-points and also create lots of small, short-lived branches.
At the end of the day we need to stop floundering around, worrying with our code as it is. We need to have a good understanding of the tools at hand so that they can instill in us the confidence to stop timid edits.
