“Refactoring” is one of the most abused terms in programming. It has a formal meaning but when generally used it tends to mean rewriting or restructuring code (or as I like to refer to it: changing stuff). One interesting new use of refactoring I heard recently was to describe extracting common code. Creating some new codebase is perhaps the opposite of refactoring.

So refactoring tends to mean developers are just changing things they have already written. Real refactoring is of course done to code under test so I was interested in a Stuart Halloway quote about compilation being the weakest form of unit-testing. Scala is used a lot at the Guardian and it has a more powerful type system and compiler than Java which means if you play along with the type system you actually get a lot of that weak unit-testing. In fact structuring your code to maximise the compiler guarantees and adding the various assertion methods to make sure that you fail fast at runtime are two of things that help increase your productivity with Scala.

If you’ve seen the Coursera Scala videos you can see Martin Odersky doing some of this “weak refactoring” in his example code where he simplifies chained collection operations by moving or creating simple functionality in his types.

Of course just like regular refactoring there have to be a few rules to this. Firstly weak refactoring absolutely requires you use explicit function type declarations. Essentially in a weak refactor what you are doing is changing the body of a function while retaining its parameters and return type. If you can still compile after you’ve changed code you are probably good.

However the other critical thing is how much covariance the return type has. A return type of Option for example is probably a bad candidate for weak refactoring as it is probably critical whether your changed code still returns Some or None for a given set of a parameters. Only conventional refactoring can determine whether that is true.