History
In the past refactoring was avoided in development processes. One example of this is that CVS (created in 1984) does not version the moving or renaming of files and directories.
Although refactoring code has been done informally for years, William Griswold's 1991 Ph.D. dissertation is one of the first major academic works on refactoring functional and procedural programs, followed by William Opdyke's 1992 dissertation on the refactoring of object-oriented programs, although all the theory and machinery have long been available as program transformation systems. All of these resources provide a catalog of common methods for refactoring; a refactoring method has a description of how to apply the method and indicators for when you should (or should not) apply the method.
Martin Fowler's book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code is the canonical reference.
The first known use of the term "refactoring" in the published literature was in a September, 1990 article by William F. Opdyke and Ralph E. Johnson. Griswold's Ph.D. thesis, Opdyke's Ph.D. thesis, published in 1992, also used this term.
The term "factoring" has been used in the Forth community since at least the early 1980s. Chapter Six of Leo Brodie's book Thinking Forth (1984) is dedicated to the subject.
In extreme programming, the Extract Method refactoring technique has essentially the same meaning as factoring in Forth; to break down a "word" (or function) into smaller, more easily maintained functions.
Refactorings can also be reconstructed posthoc to produce concise descriptions of complex software changes recorded in software repositories like CVS or SVN.
Read more about this topic: Code Refactoring
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)