bkil vs. programming

This is one of the reasons I advocate improving your tools before you start to solve complicated projects. ECMAscript was created in the past millennium for messing around with your cursor and making text blink. Any serious use is a kludge . Big respect for people making superhuman efforts to develop working web applications, but why make your life more difficult than it needs to be? "If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I would spend six hours sharpening my axe" - attributed to Abraham Lincoln Check out  Minification is not enough, you need tree shaking on Seth Ladd's google engineer's blog

EDIT: updated on 2016-02-06 (fixed links, added QtCreator) The people I've discussed refactoring with usually got pretty enthusiastic about it when showing them what can be done in properly designed languages like Java, Erlang or Haskell. They asked whether these kind of things were doable for weaker programming languages like C and C++ by free open source tools. I don't have much experience in this topic, as I haven't done bigger projects in this language yet, and the small ones I did were usually properly designed for the purpose from the start. So I looked around for possible solutions , and doing a few web searches yielded the following links. I may try some of these in the future just for curiosity. Be warned that not all listed features are available or complete. If you have experience with any of these, or with any refactoring tool for that matter, please let us hear your voice in the comments. (Maybe it would be worthwhile to open a wiki about available ref...

I happen to share Joel Spolsky's view on the question of whether it's worth it to rewrite from scratch . He goes into great detail to show that you'd be almost always better off to reuse and refactor as much as you can from an evolutionarily tried and mostly working solution. He puts it as follows: The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. He then goes on to analyze some of the most prominent issues that could lead the development team to consider a rewrite, and how to solve them without throwing away code. Nevertheless, would you be surprised if I shared that, according to my limited information, some modules of a certain programming language refactoring tool go through regular rewriting from scratch? It seems that not all eat their own dog food.