Let's talk about feelings

I seem to recall that back in the days when he was prone to wild outbursts of public self-examination (this even before blogging and twitter) John Cleese gave an interview in part about his early experiences with therapy, with a "talking" cure. His therapist would begin, "How do you feel?" and John would say "Well, I think..." and his therapist would interrupt "No. How do you feel?" and John would say "Well, I think..." and his therapist would interrupt "No. How do you feel?" And so on. You can see the problem. And he couldn't, I suppose. Which was the problem.

More and more these days I want to ask people how they feel about their code. Here's part of why.

Ivan Moore and "the other" Mike Hill have this conference session that they do called Programming in the Small [pdf]. I love it. They put little examples of code in front of folks and invite them to refactor, just a little bit. And then reflect on the refactoring. One of the things they've noticed that programers tend to do under these conditions is futz around with the code before getting down to actually improving the design.

Mike and Steve Freeman do a similar session called "Programming without Getters" This is in the so-called "dojo" format, where a revolving pair of programmers is invited to take some fairly typical "enterprise" class code and refactor it to remove the getters. There are those of us that believe that there can be something quite special about OO code with that property, but the session didn't really get there. That's because the pairs couldn't bring themselves to do the refactoring as asked, they couldn't even start to remove any getters, until they'd futzed around with the code first. And since a new person rolls into the pair every five minutes or so, it's pretty much a non-stop futz-fest.

Linda Rising saw a talk I give about this design metric that I've been playing with over the last couple of years (I have a day job, so progress has been slow). She was struck by my observation that folks who've tried this metric on their own code have reported that refactoring which made them happier with the code also increases the value of the metric. Linda wanted to know if they really said "happier". They really do.

It turns out that Linda did some research back in the day on a design metric of her own. During this work she had noticed that in general, programers like to futz around with code before they get down to work on it. If I recall correctly, she asked Dick Gabriel about this and he said that "programmers do that", along with some allusion to that metaphorical aphorism about the flavour of soup and pissing in it. I'm sure a lot of that goes on. But what Linda (again, this is as well as I recall) further noticed was that they tended to do this much less with code that scored well on her metric. And they described themselves as being more comfortable working on this code than on code that had a low score.

Now, I've nothing against metrics in principle (after all, I seem to be in the middle of inventing one) but I'm rather dubious about all this dashbordery and piechartism that's going on these days, all this getting of the CI server to dish up trends of metrics and blah, blah, blah. It's nice to have the numbers, it's nice to see a healthy trend, but.......

How do you feel about your code? Does it make you happy? Is it comfortable?