Refactoring in a large code base

[Rustom Mody]

On Friday, January 22, 2016 at 4:49:19 PM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 9:19 PM, Marko Rauhamaa  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"?

Put thus 'generistically' this is a rhetorical question and makes Marko look like
he's making a really foolish point

Specifically, what little Ive seen under the CPython hood looked distinctly improvable. egs.

1. My suggestion to have the docs re. generator-function vs generator-objects
cleaned up had no takers
2. My students trying to work inside the lexer made a mess because the extant lexer is a mess.
I.e. while python(3) *claims* to accept Unicode input, the actual lexer is
an ASCII lexer special-cased for unicode rather than pre-lexing utf8 to unicode

These are just specific examples that I am familiar with
Chris' general point still stands, viz take the large and complex program that is cpython
and clean up these messinesses: You will still have a large and complex program