[Jach]

"Refactoring" has a definitive origin, which is Martin Fowler's Refactoring book from 1999.

Fowler wanted to write the book using Smalltalk, but because the techniques he wanted to write about were fairly language agnostic, he did it in Java, as that was more popular. Unfortunately I think a lot of programmers missed the point, and now think refactoring is only something that can be done well in languages like Java (static typing) and with IDE support.

He's announced a second edition[0] in which he'll use JavaScript, to again prove the point that the techniques matter less than the language (other than sometimes techniques that work for class-based designs aren't as relevant as for function-based designs) and because JS is so popular. I'm not optimistic it will help anyone see the underlying point, but at the very least it might kill the idea that refactoring has to be hard in non-static-typed languages.

[0] https://martinfowler.com/articles/201803-refactoring-2nd-ed....