Dave Donaldson

So as I'm sure most of you know, the original Star Wars trilogy was released today for the first time on DVD (yes, I already have my copy - widescreen version of course). This is obviously something legions of fans have been waiting for, myself included (duh). Much has been said about the changes and improvements George Lucas has made to these films, from the original theatrical releases (1977, 1980, 1983) to the Special Editions (1997) to the DVD versions of today (see news items here, here, here, and here).

This got me thinking about some comments Lucas has made with how he perceives his own movies, in fact, how all directors feel about their movies - that they are never done; they only run out of time and/or money. I've always found this interesting because the fans of these movies think otherwise.

Let me switch gears for a second, I promise this all ties together. Last week I was having lunch with a colleague (you ever notice that the word “colleague” sounds more uppity than “co-worker”?) and we were discussing the topic of writing. He was asking about my writing process and as I was explaining it, I realized that writing is very much like coding: changes are made all the time in the cycle of its development until the deadline. The only notable difference is that changes made during the writing of an article (or book, etc) are called “revisions” while changes to the writing of code is called “refactoring”. Other than that, the process is remarkably similar.

Good developers are seldom completely happy with their code because they are always looking at it to find better ways of doing things (how to make it more efficient, perform better, be easier to maintain, etc, etc). I'm guilty of this in coding and writing.

So how does all this relate to Star Wars? Well for one, we're geeks, so we have to love Star Wars - it's a rule :-) But seriously, as I was reading some of the news items mentioned above, it occurred to me that George Lucas is the master of refactoring. His refactoring is just taking place in a different medium.