Extreme Refactoring

Again Keith Ray, this time on design, refactoring, and language choice...

Brian Button decided to explore refactoring by taking the Video Store example from Martin Fowler's book and refactoring it into methods one line long, no private methods, and aggressively removing all duplication, particularly duplication of iteration over containers.

His starting point (and Fowler's ending point) is the class named "Customer", containing a list of rentals. It has private methods for calculating rental cost and "frequent renter points", and a large method for printing the customer's statement. Brian's ending point is seven classes: Customer, RentalStatement, RentalCollection, Collector, LineItemPrinter, FrequentPointsTotaller, RentalCostTotaller.

If he had been programming in Ruby or Smalltalk instead of C#, he probably could have met his goals with only first two classes. Blocks and iteration methods built into Smalltalk/Ruby collection classes would have eliminated the need to create the other five classes.