It’s more than a little ironic that many of us preach safety first to our children, nieces, and nephews but in our roles as programmers scream for freedom, a hybrid of the Wild West gunslinger and teenage driver. Give us freedom, give us the resources, and watch us fly.

— Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler Quotes

I can’t choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can choose whether I care.

— Martin Fowler

Why is composing symphonies tough? I don’t know. It’s just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that’s the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

— Martin Fowler

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it’s dangerous when you use it to justify answers.

— Martin Fowler

Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent.

— Martin Fowler

If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.

— Martin Fowler

A heuristic we follow is that whenever we feel the need to comment something, we write a method instead.

— Martin Fowler

When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program’s code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.

— Martin Fowler

Poorly designed code usually takes more code to do the same things, often because the code quite literally does the same thing in several places.

— Martin Fowler

Other than when you are very close to a deadline, however, you should not put off refactoring because you haven’t got time. Experience with several projects has shown that a bout of refactoring results in increased productivity. Not having enough time usually is a sign that you need to do some refactoring.

— Martin Fowler

I’ve found that refactoring helps me write fast software. It slows the software in the short term while I’m refactoring, but it makes the software easier to tune during optimization. I end up well ahead.

— Martin Fowler

Parallel inheritance hierarchies is really a special case of shotgun surgery. In this case, every time you make a subclass of one class, you also have to make a subclass of another.

— Martin Fowler

Life being what it is, you won’t get your names right the first time. In this situation you may well be tempted to leave it – after all it’s only a name. That is the work of the evil demon Obfuscatis; don’t listen to him. If you see a badly named method, it is imperative that you change it. Remember your code is for a human first and a computer second. Humans need good names.

— Martin Fowler

It’s more than a little ironic that many of us preach safety first to our children, nieces, and nephews but in our roles as programmers scream for freedom, a hybrid of the Wild West gunslinger and teenage driver. Give us freedom, give us the resources, and watch us fly.

— Martin Fowler

If you have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it’s doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the “what”.

— Martin Fowler

It reminds me of a statement Kent Beck often makes about himself: “I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.” Refactoring helps me be much more effective at writing robust code.

— Martin Fowler

First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t distribute your objects!

— Martin Fowler

Architectural refactoring is hard, and we’re still ignorant of its full costs, but it isn’t impossible. Here the best.

— Martin Fowler

A statement Kent Beck often makes about himself, “I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.

— Martin Fowler

People sometimes ask me what length I look for in a method. To me length is not the issue. The key is the semantic distance between the method name and the method body. If extracting improves clarity, do it, even if the name is longer than the code you have extracted.

— Martin Fowler

You can Change Your Organization or Change Your Organization.

— Martin Fowler
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