Industry Figure Tom Chappell

I am a long-time fan of P.G. Wodehouse (author of, among many other things, the Jeeves and Wooster stories and novels), for which I have to thank my old friend, Industry Figure Larry Helmerich: I own, I believe, about 50 of his novels or collections of short stories.

I am also a long-time Douglas Adams fan (The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency), and again, an Industry Figure (Andy Bennett) is to blame, as it was his subscription to a literary newsletter that first alerted me to Mr. Adams’s work, in 1979.

And I was familiar with Wodehouse’s technique, used in the Jeeves novels, and described in Adams’s The Salmon of Doubt, of pinning up each page around the room, higher if he thought it was good, lower if he thought it needed work, with the goal of getting every page up to the picture rail.

But I had never thought to use it when refactoring a computer program. That’s brilliant!

“The P.G. Wodehouse Method of Refactoring“