Tuesday 23 May 2017

Are Refactoring Tools Less Effective Overall?

Prior to the addition of automatic refactoring tools to modern IDEs refactoring was essentially a manual affair. You would make a code change, hit build, and then fix all the compiler errors (at least for statically typed languages). This technique is commonly known as “leaning on the compiler”. Naturally the operation could be fraught with danger if you were far too ambitious about the change, but knowing when you could lean on the compiler was part of the art of refactoring safely back then.

A Hypothesis

Having lived through both eras (manual and automatic) and paired with developers far more skilled with the automatic approach I’ve come up with a totally non-scientific hypothesis that suggests automatic refactoring tools are actually less effective than the manual approach, overall.

I guess the basis of this hypothesis pretty much hinges on what I mean by “effective”. Here I’m suggesting that automatic tools help you easily refactor to a local minima but not to a global minima [1]; consequently the codebase as a whole ends up in a less coherent state.

Shallow vs Deep Refactoring

The goal of an automatic refactoring tool appears to be to not break your code – it will only allow you to use it to perform a simple refactoring that can be done safely, i.e. if the tool can’t fix up all the code it can see [2] it won’t allow you to do it in the first place. The consequence of this is that the tool constantly limits you to taking very small steps. Watching someone refactor with a tool can sometimes seem tortuous as they may need to use so many little refactoring steps to get the code into the desired state because you cannot make the leaps you want in one go unless you switch to manual mode.

This by itself isn’t a bad thing, after all making a safe change is clearly A Good Thing. No, where I see the problem is that by fixing up all the call sites automatically you don’t get to see the wider effects of the refactoring you’re attempting.

For example the reason you’d choose to rename a class or method is because the existing one is no longer appropriate. This is probably because you’re learned something new about the problem domain. However that class or method does not exist in a vacuum, it has dependencies in the guise of variable names and related types. It’s entirely likely that some of these may now be inappropriate too, however you won’t easily see them because the tool has likely hidden them from you.

Hence one of the “benefits” of the old manual refactoring approach was that as you visited each broken call site you got to reflect on your change in the context of where it’s used. This often led to further refactorings as you began to comprehend the full nature of what you had just discovered.

Blue or Red Pill?

Of course what I’ve just described could easily be interpreted as the kind of “black hole” that many, myself included, would see as an unbounded unit of work. It’s one of those nasty rabbit holes where you enter and, before you know it, you’re burrowing close to the Earth’s core and have edited nearly every file in the entire workspace.

Yes, like any change, it takes discipline to stick to the scope of the original problem. Just because you keep unearthing more and more code that no longer appears to fit the new model it does not mean you have to tackle it right now. Noticing the disparity is the first step towards fixing it.

Commit Review

It’s not entirely true that you won’t see the entire outcome of the refactoring – at the very least the impact will be visible when you review the complete change before committing. (For a fairly comprehensive list of the things I go through at the point I commit see my C Vu article “Commit Checklist”.)

This assumes of course that you do a thorough review of your commits before pushing them. However by this point, just as writing tests after the fact are considerably less attractive, so is finishing off any refactoring; perhaps even more so because the code is not broken per-se, it just might not be the best way of representing the solution.

It’s all too easy to justify the reasons why it’s okay to go ahead and push the change as-is because there are more important things to do. Even if you think you’re aware of technical debt it often takes a fresh pair of eyes to see how you’re living in a codebase riddled with inconsistencies that make it hard to see it’s true structure. One is then never quite sure without reviewing the commit logs what is the legacy and what is the new direction.

Blinded by Tools

Clearly this is not the fault of the tool or their vendors. What they offer now is far more favourable than not having them at all. However once again we need to be reminded that we should not be slaves to our tools but that we are the masters. This is a common theme which is regularly echoed in the software development community and something I myself tackled in the past with “Don’t Let Your Tools Pwn You”.

The Boy Scout Rule (popularised by Uncle Bob) says that we should always leave the camp site cleaner than we found it. While picking up a handful of somebody else’s rubbish and putting it in the bin might meet the goal in a literal sense, it’s no good if the site is acquiring rubbish faster than it’s being collected.

Refactoring is a technique for improving the quality of a software design in a piecewise fashion; just be careful you don’t spend so long on your hands and knees cleaning small areas that you fail to spot the resulting detritus building up around you.

 

[1] I wasn’t sure whether to say minima or maxima but I felt that refactoring was about lowering entropy in some way so went with the reduction metaphor.

[2] Clearly there are limits around published APIs which it just has to ignore.

Thursday 18 May 2017

Excel-style DDE Requests

Despite being over 2 decades old Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) in Windows still seems to be in use for Windows IPC by a not insignificant number of companies. At least, if the frequency of DDE questions in my inbox is anything to go by [1][2].

Earlier this year I got a question from someone who was trying to use my DDE Command tool (a command line tool for querying DDE servers) to get data out of the MetaTrader 4 platform. Finance is the area I first came across DDE in anger and it still seems to be a popular choice there even to this day.

Curious Behaviour

The problem was that when they used the ddecmdrequest” verb to send an XTYP_REQUEST message to the MetaTrader 4 DDE Server (MT4) for a symbol they always got an immediate result of “N/A”. As a workaround they tried using the “advise” verb, which sends an XTYP_ADVSTART, to listen for updates for a short period instead. This worked for symbols which changed frequently but missed those that didn’t change during the interval. Plus this was a dirty hack as they had to find a way to send a CTRL+C to my tool to stop it after this short interval.

Clearly the MetaTrader DDE server couldn’t be this broken, and the proof was that it worked fine with Microsoft Excel – the other stalwart of the finance industry. Hence the question posed to me was why Excel appeared to work, but sending a request from my tool didn’t, i.e. was there a bug in my tool?

Reproducing the Problem

Given the popularity of the MetaTrader platform and Microsoft Excel the application of Occam’s Razor would suggest a bug in my tool was clearly the most likely answer, so I investigated…

Luckily MetaTrader 4 is a free download and they will even give you a demo account to play with which is super welcome for people like me who only want to use the platform to fix interop problems in their own tools and don’t actually want to use it to trade.

I quickly reproduced the problem by sending a DDE request for a common symbol:

> DDECmd.exe request -s MT4 -t QUOTE -i COPPER
N\A

And then I used the DDE advise command to see it working for background updates:

> DDECmd.exe advise -s MT4 -t QUOTE -i COPPER
2.5525 2.5590
2.5520 2.5590
. . . 

I also tried it in Excel too to see that it was successfully managing to request the current value, even for slow ticking symbols.

How Excel Requests Data Via DDE

My DDE Command tool has a nice feature where it can also act as a DDE server and logs the different requests sent to it. This was originally added by me to help diagnose problems in my own DDE client code but it’s also been useful to see how other DDE clients behave.

As you can see below, when Excel opens a DDE link (=TEST|TEST!X) it actually sends a number of different XTYP_ADVSTART messages as it tries to find the highest fidelity format to receive the data in:

> DDECmd.exe listen –s TEST –t TEST
XTYP_CONNECT: 'TEST', 'TEST'
XTYP_CONNECT_CONFIRM: 'TEST', 'TEST'
XTYP_ADVSTART: 'T…', 'T…', 'StdDocumentName', '49157'
XTYP_ADVSTART: 'TEST', 'TEST', 'X', '50018'
. . .
XTYP_REQUEST: 'TEST', 'TEST', 'X', '50018'

After it manages to set-up the initial advise loop it then goes on to send a one-off XTYP_REQUEST to retrieve the initial value. So, apart from the funky data formats it asks for, there is nothing unusual about the DDE request Excel seems to make.

Advise Before Request

And then it dawned on me, what if the MetaTrader DDE server required an advise loop to be established on a symbol before you’re allowed to request it? Sure enough, I hacked a bit of code into my request command to start an advise loop first and the subsequent DDE request succeeded.

I don’t know if this is a bug in the MetaTrader 4 DDE server or the intended behaviour. I suspect the fact that it works with Excel covers the vast majority of users so maybe it’s never been a priority to support one-off data requests. The various other financial DDE servers I coded against circa 2000 never exhibited this kind of requirement – you could make one-off requests for data with a standalone XTYP_REQUEST message.

The New Fetch Command

The original intent of my DDE Command tool was to provide a tool that allows each XTYP_* message to be sent to a DDE server in isolation, mostly for testing purposes. As such the tools’ verbs pretty much have a one-to-one correspondence with the DDE messages you might send yourself.

To allow people to use my tool against the MetaTrader 4 platform to snapshot data would therefore mean making some kind of small change. I did consider adding various special switches to the existing request and advise verbs, either to force an advise first or to force a request if no immediate update was received but that seemed to go against the ethos a bit.

In the end I decided to add a new verb called “fetch” which acts just like “request”, but starts an advise loop for every item first, then sends a request message for the latest value, thereby directly mimicking Excel.

> DDECmd.exe fetch -s MT4 -t QUOTE -i COPPER -i SILVER
COPPER|2.6075 2.6145
SILVER|16.771 16.821

Hey presto it now works!

This feature was released in DDE Command v1.6.

 

[1] This is a bit of artistic licence :o), they are not a daily occurrence but once every couple of months wouldn’t be far off. So yes, “DDE Is Still Alive & Kicking”.

[2] Most recently it seems quite a few people are beginning to discover that Microsoft dropped NetDDE support way back in Windows Vista.

Tuesday 16 May 2017

My Dislike of GOPATH

[This post was written in response to a tweet from Matt Aimonetti which asked “did you ever try #golang? If not, can you tell me why? If yes, what was the first blocker/annoyance you encountered?”]

I’m a dabbler in Go [1], by which I mean I know enough to be considered dangerous but not enough to be proficient. I’ve done a number of katas and even paired on some simple tools my team has built in Go. There is so much to like about it that I’ve had cause to prefer looking for 3rd party tools written in it in the faint hope that I might at some point be able to contribute one day. But, every time I pull the source code I end up wasting so much time trying to get the thing to build because Go has its own opinions about how the source is laid out and tools are built that don’t match the way I (or most other tools I’ve used) work.

Hello, World!

Go is really easy to get into, on Windows it’s as simple as:

> choco install golang

This installs the compiler and standard libraries and you’re all ready to get started. The obligatory first program is as simple as doing:

> pushd \Dev
> mkdir HelloWorld
> notepad HelloWorld.go
> go build HelloWorld.go
> HelloWorld

So far, so good. It’s pretty much the same as if you were writing in any other compiled language – create folder, create source file, build code, run it.

Along the way you may have run into some complaint about the variable GOPATH not being set. It’s easily fixed by simply doing:

> set GOPATH=%CD%

You might have bothered to read up on all the brouhaha, got side-tracked and discovered that it’s easy to silence the complaint without any loss of functionality by setting it to point to anywhere. After all the goal early on is just to get your first program built and running not get bogged down in tooling esoterica.

When I reached this point I did a few katas and used a locally installed copy of the excellent multi-language exercise tool cyber-dojo.org to have a play with the test framework and some of the built-in libraries. Using a tool like cyber-dojo meant that GOPATH problems didn’t rear their ugly head again as it was already handled by the tool and the katas only needed standard library stuff.

The first non-kata program my team wrote in Go (which I paired on) was a simple HTTP smoke test tool that also just lives in the same repo as the service it tests. Once again their was nary a whiff of GOPATH issues here either – still simple.

Git Client, But not Quite

The problems eventually started for me when I tried to download a 3rd party tool off the internet and build it [2]. Normally, getting the source code for a tool from an online repository, like GitHub, and then building it is as simple as:

> git clone https://…/tool.git
> pushd tool
> build

Even if there is no Windows build script, with the little you know about Go at this point you’d hope it to be something like this:

> go build

What usually happens now is that you start getting funny errors about not being able to find some code which you can readily deduce is some missing package dependency.

This is the point where you start to haemorrhage time as you seek in vain to fix the missing package dependency without realising that the real mistake you made was right back at the beginning when you used “git clone” instead of “go get”. Not only that but you also forgot that you should have been doing all this inside the “%GOPATH%\src” folder and not in some arbitrary TEMP folder you’d created just to play around in.

The goal was likely to just build & run some 3rd party tool in isolation but that’s not the way Go wants you to see the world.

The Folder as a Sandbox

The most basic form of isolation, and therefore version control, in software development is the humble file-system folder [3]. If you want to monkey with something on the side just make a copy of it in another folder and you know your original is safe. This style of isolation (along with other less favourable forms) is something I’ve written about in depth before in my C Vu In the Toolbox column, see “The Developer’s Sandbox”.

Unfortunately for me this is how I hope (expect) all tools to work out of the box. Interestingly Go is a highly opinionated language (which is a good thing in many cases) that wants you to do all your coding under one folder, identified by the GOPATH variable. The rationale for this is that it reduces friction from versioning problems and helps ensure everyone, and everything, is always using a consistent set of dependencies – ideally the latest.

Tool User, Not Developer

That policy makes sense for Google’s developers working on their company’s tools, but I’m not a Google developer, I’m a just a user of the tool. My goal is to be able to build and run the tool. If there happens to be a simple bug that I can fix, then great, I’d like to do that, but what I do not have the time for is getting bogged down in library versioning issues because the language believes everyone, everywhere should be singing from the same hymn sheet. I’m more used to a world where dependencies move forward at a pace dictated by the author not by the toolchain itself. Things can still move quickly without having to continually live on the bleeding edge.

Improvements

As a Go outsider I can see that the situation is definitely improving. The use of a vendor subtree to house a snapshot of the dependencies in source form makes life much simpler for people like me who just want to use the tool hassle free and dabble occasionally by fixing things here and there.

In the early days when I first ran into this problem I naturally assumed it was my problem and that I just needed to set the GOPATH variable to the root of the repo I had just cloned. I soon learned that this was a fools errand as the repo also has to buy into this and structure their source code accordingly. However a variant of this has got some traction with the gb tool which has (IMHO) got the right idea about isolation but sadly is not the sanctioned approach and so you’re dicing with the potential for future impedance mismatches. Ironically to build and install this tool requires GOPATH to still be working the proper way.

The latest version of Go (1.8) will assume a default location for GOPATH (a “go” folder under your profile) if it’s not set but that does not fix the fundamental issue for me which is that you need to understand that any code you pull down may be somewhere unrelated on your file-system if you don’t understand how all this works.

Embracing GOPATH

Ultimately if I am going to properly embrace Go as a language, and I would like to do more, I know that I need to stop fighting the philosophy and just “get with the programme”. This is hard when you have a couple of decades of inertia to overcome but I’m sure I will eventually. It’s happened enough times now that I know what the warnings signs are and what I need to Google to do it “the Go way”.

Okay, so I don’t like or agree with all of (that I know) the choices the Go language has taken but then I’m always aware of the popular quote by Bjarne Stroustrup:

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

This post is but one tiny data point which covers one of the very few complaints I have about Go, and even then it’s just really a bit of early friction that occurs at the start of the journey if you’re not a regular. Still, better that than yet another language nobody uses.

 

[1] Or golang if you want to appease the SEO crowd :o).

[2] It was winrm-cli as I was trying to put together a bug report for Terraform and there was something going wrong with running a Windows script remotely via WinRM.

[3] Let’s put old fashioned technologies like COM to one side for the moment and assume we have learned from past mistakes.