Thread by @RonJeffries

In my programming work, much of which has been published in my “Programming in Public” style, my agenda has been to explore the “emergence” of good design in an incremental fashion. That doesn’t mean good design “just happens”, though it does sometimes feel like that.

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What it means is that with attention to good naming, to removal of duplication, to making things simpler, to putting similar things together and breaking different things apart, one can grow the program in capability, and the quality of the design, together.

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It becomes less clear whether today’s design thoughts are prior to today’s work, or subsequent to yesterday’s. It’s like designing all the time.

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If — and only if, in my view — we pay attention to design all the time, then, if you just watch the evolution of the system’s design, it seems to emerge. It goes in a series of small phases, getting a bit worse as the program does more, then getting better as we refactor.

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If we just look at the end points after refactoring, the design just gets better and better.

I don’t imagine, and neither should you, that the design gets better all by itself. Nor do Design Elves come in at night and clean up the cruft and make the design better.

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No! The programmer, me in this case, causes the design to grow and improve, through continuous attention to the design.

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I think that if folks had actually paid attention to what I’ve written and said in these past two decades, they’d know that the design of their program is up to them. Neither the Authors, nor the Design Elves, are going to come in and fix it.

It’s you, folks. It’s you.

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