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To add to his point about copy and pasting... Notice the contradiction implicit in these bits of accepted dogma: 1. Copy and pasting code is evil (DRY). 2. T

• arjie 11y ago
  That's not really true, is it? Coupling is independent from explicit code dependencies. Take, for instance, two programs. One writes to "/tmp/file". The other reads from "/tmp/file" but neither shares the code to determine the path ("/tmp/file", in this case). They're code independent, but very tightly coupled. In fact, I'd hypothesise that copy-paste codebases are more tightly coupled than otherwise.
  • jonahx 11y ago
    It's certainly true. Coupling measures the degree of interdependence between modules/functions/classes. If everything is copy/pasted, no module depends on any other -- it simply has its own copy of the code. This will result in a terrible system, but it will be very loosely coupled. When you change something, you won't have to worry about it's impact on anything else. In your example, if the content of the file is changing the behavior of the program reading it, then the programs are sharing code via the file. It just happens to be going on at runtime rather than at compile time.
• stepanhruda 11y ago
  If you need to delete code in a codebase full of copy pastes, it's likely that you will need to delete it in many many places and miss some of them. So although the code isn't coupled, it is hard to delete.
  • randallsquared 11y ago
    In this case, the code is coupled; it's just that it's coupled through the programmer. :/
• tel 11y ago
  I think that was always implicit and intentional. There really is a tension here. Artful programming rides that tension and understands when (1) is worse than (2) or visa versa. A standard rule of thumb for this tension is the old "rule of three" but it's just a rule of thumb.
• deleted 11y ago
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