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Comment Re:Do most of the work? (Score 1) 443

OK, so you're lucky enough to be writing code from scratch, and you're not working with other people. And you're working on an algorithm in engine code, rather than applications. That cuts down how often you'd want to do it.

That's kind of similar to the students I mentioned that are the classic users of vi.

But in the commercial world, you're usually working on large, complex systems, with a lot of history, usually originally written by other people. And you know it'll be built on still further by other people in future.

IDEs help handle the complexity of big projects. Of which the refactor/renaming rather than search/replace is just one example.

Comment Re:Do most of the work? (Score 1) 443

People using simple editors rarely do. The work and the risk that you'll introduce a bug often isn't considered worth reconsidering the name of a function or identifier. Especially with OO code.

But if you're using an IDE with refactoring support, there's next to no risk, and it's fast. So there's no reason not to rename if clarification is needed, or the code was originally written by someone who's not good at naming things.

I do it quite often.

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