Refactoring in a large code base

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 9:19 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> The knowhow, vision and skill is apparently very rare. On the product
> management side, we have the famous case of Steve Jobs, who simply told
> the engineers to go back to the drawing boards when he didn't like the
> user experience. Most others would have simply surrendered to the
> mediocre designs and shipped the product.
>
> We need similar code sanity management. Developers are given much too
> much power to mess up the source code. That's why "legacy" is considered
> a four-letter word among developers.

So what do you do with a huge program? Do you send it back to the
developers and say "Do this is less lines of code"?

CPython is a large and complex program. How do you propose doing it "right"?

ChrisA