Martin Fowler

1963– · British programmer

Topics: software design, programming, software engineering, simplicity

• Transparency is valuable, but while many things can be made transparent in distributed objects, performance isn't usually one of them.

  — Martin Fowler

• Modeling Principle: Models are not right or wrong; they are more or less useful.

  — Martin Fowler

• The definition I use for a pattern is an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others

  — 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

• Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

  — 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

• Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility

  — Martin Fowler

• Often designers do complicated things that improve the capacity on a particular hardware platform when it might actually be cheaper to buy more hardware.

  — Martin Fowler

• One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is to avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase.

  — Martin Fowler

• In almost all cases I'm opposed to setting aside time for refactoring. In my view refactoring is not an activity you set aside time to do. Refactoring is something you do all the time in little bursts.

  — Martin Fowler