4 ms·

There is substantial technical debt introduced by copy and pasting code. I've made a rule for myself: Never paste more than three lines of code at once. It f

by valine 11y ago

There is substantial technical debt introduced by copy and pasting code. I've made a rule for myself: Never paste more than three lines of code at once. It forces me to understand the code I'm copying, and it keeps my work tidy.

diskcat 11y ago
The trick to copying and pasting is doing it when it won't be you paying back the debt. Just like how the US economy works.
edwinksl 11y ago
Good idea.
taneq 11y ago
That, or if you really have to use more, have a standard comment to mark such occasions so you can come back later and understand/fix it. // voodoo magic from stackoverflow starts here (link: ...)
- milansm 11y ago
  > so you can come back later and understand/fix it But, of course, that's very unlikely to happen.
  - dave2000 11y ago
    Sure it does. Right when you're writing/updating the documentation.
    - ovi256 11y ago
      I think you would come back to it when you're having a critical issue impacting lots of users and to fix it, you finally need to understand that code.
    - logicrook 11y ago
      Exactly, it means the same thing, never.
  - frogpelt 11y ago
    I maintain a rather large code base and have found several // FIXME comments in random places, put there by people who no longer work here.
christianmann 11y ago
Even just retyping the exact code helps me quite a bit.