> I also see every few months objects and classes with code copied (as in ctrl-c ctrl-v) instead of generalized. What is easier to generalise - 1. the poin

> I also see every few months objects and classes with code copied (as in ctrl-c ctrl-v) instead of generalized. What is easier to generalise - 1. the point where you realise you need to do basically the same thing in another location with a few small changes 2. the point where you have a few cases of basically the same thing with their own small differences in context? Counterintuitively i think it's 2. It's the "small differences in context" which cause the issue. Once you see a few examples of how the code will be used it's often much simpler to generalise. You don't need to guess any of the future use cases, you have a bunch of examples to work with and you can be far more confident in your improvement. The kicker is that 2 is much cheaper at all steps. I think the biggest problem with this idea is setting a time limit to allow these duplications to grow - if you allow for it indefinitely, you'll end up with duplicated code building on top of duplicated code. In that scenario, the refactoring becomes harder not easier.