Rambles around computer science
Diverting trains of thought, wasting precious time
Mon, 05 Dec 2011
Refactoring refactoring
A little while ago I embarrassed myself in conversation by blurting out a sceptical opinion of refactoring. In this post I'll explain some opinions on refactoring and related research, hopefully in a more considered and coherent manner that I managed on that occasion.
I admit that my inclination to be a bit negative comes from prejudice, with a couple of origins. One is that a while ago, I had to fend off (rhetorical) claims that refactoring solved what my PhD was doing. It clearly didn't, but then again, it was well worth writing an explanation of why not. (These claims were from my supervisor, not my examiners, thankfully, and I think were being advanced rhetorically.) In that context, interface evolution scenarios were the issue. I still contend that refactoring is not the solution to interface evolution. (Endlessly editing code to stay in sync with “one true” “current” version of an interface, whether with or without the help of refactoring tools, is an unnecessarily burdensome approach; an automated assist for editing code doesn't make that editing work- or risk-free.)
More refactoring
Happily, most uses of refactoring are quite different from interface evolution: they're about the internal structure of code, not “edge” interface details. I'm a big fan of refactoring in these cases. As a practitioner I'd love to have more and better refactoring. In that space, one clear improvement would be refactoring tools for more languages. This doesn't mean starting again; most languages are more alike than they are different. At the moment, the popularity of refactoring serves to cement the Java hegemony. This is my other unreasonable prejudice: I dislike this hegemony, and so refactoring culture is tained by association (unfairly) in my mind. It'd be really nice to have some decent refactorings available for C++, but I'm not holding my breath. That said, I might not know about them if they do exist.
(Aside: the real problem with C++ is not pointer arithmetic or lack of garbage collection or lack of type safety or anything else that people usually trot out; it's complexity. I'll rant about that in a future post. By contrast, Java does well because it's a simple language. Actually it does unfairly well because researchers abuse its syntax tree as an intermediate representation for program analyses. I might rant about that in yet another post.)
That's my practitioner's view over with. As a researcher, I have one qualm remaining about refactoring. Rather than doing research on making refactoring work in more and more scenarios, I want to see some exploration of a few bigger ideas in the same general space. There are ideas that are more powerful, more “revolutionary” than refactoring but have (so far) less currency.
Language-independent refactoring
Language-independent refactoring is an obvious goal. The means by which to achieve it is less obvious. A shared metamodel seems sensible. The need for a shared metamodel is arguably a limitation. But I don't buy that argument! My reasoning is based on the observation that most languages have large sets of features that are cognate. By this I mean they are not just theoretically equivalent in what they can express (or perhaps not at all equivalent in that way), but rather, a human user understands them in the same way. (I wish we had the empirical foundations to substantiate that, but that's another matter.) So if we can capture these, we can probably come up with a metamodel that works well in practice, even if it fails for adversarially-constructed cases.
Conversely, just to throw another controversial claim into the mix: languages that have such a pared-down set of primitives that they don't offer a cognate of some recurring feature---like purely functional languages without mutable objects, or C without virtual calls---in practice do have cognates, but appearing as patterns of use rather than delineated language features. So I seem positing some sort of Chomskyan “universal language feature set” that is in programmers' minds if not explicitly in all languages. That feels a bit strong; I'll have to take some time to see whether I agree with myself there.
(As an aside: of course, many languages have too many features, in that they are mutually cognate: do I use static variables, or a singleton object, e.g. in Java? Do I use typeclasses or traits, e.g. in Scala? Do I specialise using template specialisation, overloading or overriding in C++? These self-cognate features usually have arbitrary limitations, and their diversity exists for implementation reasons. Exposing a choice among them leaks implementation details to the programmer, along with consequent performance characteristics. So, forcing the programmer to select among these early on, as these languages all do, is an evil akin to the evil of premature optimisation. Fortunately, it's an evil that refactoring exists to fight!
(Continuing the aside: we perceive “clean” languages to have few mutually cognate features. Conversely, most mutually-cognate features differ along some potentially-separable dimensions: each feature mixes a particular setting on each dimension. For the “static versus singleton”, having a chunk of data that is “one per program instance” is the main concern, and dynamic-versus-static allocation is the orthogonal issue that is unhelpfully mixed with it. In a Java-like implementation, object identity is another mixed concern: it's something you get in the singleton case, not the static field case, and effectively for reasons of implementation leakage. Conversely, in C and C++, statically-allocated stuff can still have its address taken, so there is better separation of concerns in that case.)
Non-behaviour-preserving transformations
Digging deeper than language-independent refactoring, it seems that refactoring's main value is in its ability to improve code by reversing bad decisions that were somehow expedient earlier. But underneath that, there are two cases. Firstly there are cases where you refactor because you got the abstract design wrong earlier (e.g. you assumed there was only one Frob per Widget, and in fact there might be many). Secondly are the cases where you got the abstract design right, but the code-level design wrong, i.e. you didn't map the abstract design optimally onto language features (with respect to maintainability, efficiency, ...). To me, it feels like there is too much emphasis on the second case, while the first one is harder and more interesting.
I think this is because automated refactorings aim to be behaviour-preserving. But since the two problems are very close---they both arise from forced premature commitment and the programmer's failure to anticipate the future---we should perhaps use the same tools to combat both of them. In other words, the requirement that refactorings should be behaviour-preserving actively limits what we can do. So how about some bolder approaches that might sidestep the problem? While these approaches might violate the letter of the definition of refactoring, for me, they retain the most useful charateristic of refactoring: by a single localised change, we can effect global changes on our codebase.
The only work I know that does automated non-local code edits that can change program behaviour is Coccinelle, based on the “semantic patch” idea. Aspect-oriented programming is a similar technique, but works by effectively (and controversially) delocalising run-time semantics rather than performing non-local code edits. I'd like to know if there are others more like Coccinelle already in existence.
So, suppose we discard the restriction of limiting ourselves to behaviour-preserving edits. One direction under this auspice is to creep closer towards model-driven development. I want the ability to change my “model” (either in my head, or in some modelling notation) and see changes reflected in source code. And also, vice-versa: if we do have a modelling notation, code changes should update the model. This is a hard but interesting problem in bidirectional transformation, which has something of a currency at the moment (witness the BX workshop).
Logic metaprogramming
A final thought is about logic metaprogramming. This is a very cool idea that I have not yet got up to speed on. In fact, almost all I know about it is from the abstract of a paper I saw at SPLASH last year, which said: “In logic metaprogramming, programs are... derived from a deductive database.” But this one sentence is so intriguing that I want to run for a while with what I think it might entail, before I find out what is actually done in existing systems (of which there are few!).
I've often wanted to program not by writing code directly---since I'm often aware that the code I'm writing will probably turn out “wrong” or “bad” once I've done a bunch more coding---but by making a sequence of simpler statements that I have more confidence in. Each statement should be small, freestanding and less of a commitment than writing a line of code would be. These statements might be such that none of them, by itself confers enough information to write a "known good" piece of source code. E.g. I might write that each instance of class A “has a[n]” associated instance of class B, but I don't yet know whether this association should be expressed as pointers, or by some associative data structure, say. This decision could be determined later, by solving constraits originated by other small statements. Ties could be broken (i.e. multiple candidate solutions selected among) by extrafunctional requirements such as performance (which might favour pointers over associative structures).
This is related to program synthesis and refinement methodologies, I guess. But I am particularly interested in making it exploratory. By having a tool explore the implications of the programmer's statements, we can potentially refine our understanding of the problem (a.k.a. “debug the design”) without going through the circuitous path of first writing some “bad” code and then either finding it's not the right design (and cleaning it up by heavyweight code changes) or finding it's incidentally messy (and cleaning it up, just by automatic refactoring if we're lucky). We can also have a tool tell us what the “right way” to code something is, but early. If the only solution to a particular set of requirements is to use a particular language feature, then the tool can tell us this, rather than letting us find it out by making the wrong choice and then backtracking. Of course, we need to get the requirements right up front, so this technique will only ever be a complement to more backtracking-oriented techniques.
Multi-dimensional representations of software
It is a very classical notion that programs have one true form, being their source code in the form of a string of symbols. Refactoring sticks with this idea but tries to make it easier to alter that form, by abstracting and automating certain common complex non-local edit patterns. But we can go further by rejecting the notion of “one true form” altogether, at least in the sense that that form is manipulated by programmers.
Of course, this is the MDSoC holy grail. I think the idea is just slightly too big for its own good, at present. Ironically, or fittingly, it has not been decomposed properly: aspects, refactoring and typeclasses are the main programming weapons that share its spirit, but none has its power or elegance. It's a shame that work on the idea seems to have fizzled out. (It's also a shame that the paper isn't on more reading lists!)
Somewhat relatedly, there's been some interesting work on subjective/transient/dual encodings of language features, as with the registration-based stuff at last year's Onward!, or Rob Ennals' Jekyll. But I'm still not aware of any mature tools that can really rip apart the modular structure of code and transform it on demand. Perhaps one problem is that we need to be able to define what primitive entities these queries “select”, and how they reformulate them into the appropriate bigger chunks---ideally in a language-agnostic way. So it's back to the shared metamodel. Again, better understanding of “cognate” language features, and indeed of less intuitive correspondences between language features (like the nontrivial correspondences between algebraic data types and class hierarchies), will help here.
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