Welcome to the Age of Static Analysis and Automated Refactoring
Programmers live a dangerous life. It’s so easy to make mistakes and mess things up, so we like to limit the scope of our changes. There may be large parts of a code base that we don’t dare to touch at all. It makes us somewhat conservative when it comes to large upgrades or refactorings.
If only we could have a tool that has our back when we make changes that influence remote parts of a code base, or that can even make those changes for us. One that tells us about mistakes immediately after we make them. And maybe even one that fixes our problems, without the risk of making a mistake.
Actually, since a few years such tools exist (for PHP that is, so get ready to change your mind about this language!). In this talk, I’ll explain why you should use them, what its use cases are, and what amazing things are to be expected from them in the near future.