Improving nothingness : refactorings on whitespace

Esoteric languages are known for being unique, clunky to code in and generally not used for real-life applications. However, as an experimentation tool, they can be powerful to find out certain answers. Refactoring is a systematic process of improving code without creating new functionality that transforms a mess into clean code and simple design. This powerful process creates code which can be used long-term and is better to understand. In this paper, we are presenting which refactorings are possible in the minimal setting that the programming language Whitespace offers, where only comments describe what the program does. After showing the refactorings that are possible on Whitespace, we will then present a tool which automates some of these refactorings. Finally, we will present the tests we have performed on the tool to check its validity.