I have not completely bought into the XP way of doing things, but I find many of their arguments compelling. One is to never, ever scrap a project and rewrite from scratch. Rather, they advocate having a good test suite and then continually refactoring the code until it looks like you want it to. This doesn't mean necessarily stopping structural changes, just that they are tightly controled.

A system that is functional has one undeniable trait: it works. You may not like how it works. You may need to do extensive checks to make a two-line change. You may hate its user interface. But it works. Likely, the programmer before you had already encountered subtle issues in the problem domain that aren't immediately obvious. If you don't know about them, you'll end up hitting them in your new version. The result of these refinements may end up in a morass that is no better than the orginal.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to Re: Structural Elegance by hardburn
in thread Structural Elegance by samizdat

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