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Hugely agree. Every junior on my team has heard me say: "copy-paste is free; abstractions are expensive." When you move two bits of logic behind a common interf

Hugely agree. Every junior on my team has heard me say: "copy-paste is free; abstractions are expensive." When you move two bits of logic behind a common interface you tell the world that they're the same type of thing, and future editors will tend to maintain that promise - if the two things diverge further, someone will handle that by adding more parameters to the shared interface. So when deciding whether to merge two similar functions, to me the question to ask yourself is "are future changes to one of these functions almost certain to affect the other one as well?" If not, just leave the functions separate no matter how similar they are.

Jensson 2y ago
Absolutely, its always easy to detangle the mess of inexperienced programmers who copied things everywhere, the nightmare are the medium level programmers who puts everything behind big interfaces and just adds more interfaces with every change.
- Gud 2y ago
  Indeed, this was me. Now I don’t care if I have three functions doing the same thing slightly differently. Much better than having some advanced mega functions I don’t understand how it’s working anyway
chambored 2y ago
I’m only a few years in the industry, and in my CS program, we were constantly told something along the lines of “any time you have to copy paste, look for an opportunity to abstract”. I’ve been running into problems lately where my attempts at abstractions have made things significantly more complicated. Only when I hit the limits of the abstraction I realize the cost of maintaining similar functionality in multiple places was less. I’m going to try your approach in future.
- nzach 2y ago
  I think the reasoning for DRY was kind of lost in translation. “any time you have to copy paste, look for an opportunity to abstract” assumes that having an abstraction is always better, but I don't think that is the case. In my opinion the reasoning as to why "code duplication is a code smell" is that if you have to copy and paste code around you are probably missing an useful abstraction for your code. And I think "useful" is the most important thing to keep in mind. Sure, every time I copy and paste code I know that exist an abstraction I could create to eliminate this duplication. Generally this is pretty easy. The hard part is to understand when this new abstraction will help you to deliver the features the business need.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jhanschoo 2y ago
  Surely there is a parallel with standardized testing asking the most needlessly ornate prose of its students and then most writing having more value the pialner it is written.
- jhanschoo 2y ago
  Surely there is a parallel with standardized testing asking the most needlessly ornate prose of its students and then most writing having more value the plainer it is written.

Jensson 2y ago

Absolutely, its always easy to detangle the mess of inexperienced programmers who copied things everywhere, the nightmare are the medium level programmers who puts everything behind big interfaces and just adds more interfaces with every change.

Gud 2y ago
Indeed, this was me. Now I don’t care if I have three functions doing the same thing slightly differently. Much better than having some advanced mega functions I don’t understand how it’s working anyway

chambored 2y ago

I’m only a few years in the industry, and in my CS program, we were constantly told something along the lines of “any time you have to copy paste, look for an opportunity to abstract”. I’ve been running into problems lately where my attempts at abstractions have made things significantly more complicated. Only when I hit the limits of the abstraction I realize the cost of maintaining similar functionality in multiple places was less. I’m going to try your approach in future.

nzach 2y ago
I think the reasoning for DRY was kind of lost in translation. “any time you have to copy paste, look for an opportunity to abstract” assumes that having an abstraction is always better, but I don't think that is the case. In my opinion the reasoning as to why "code duplication is a code smell" is that if you have to copy and paste code around you are probably missing an useful abstraction for your code. And I think "useful" is the most important thing to keep in mind. Sure, every time I copy and paste code I know that exist an abstraction I could create to eliminate this duplication. Generally this is pretty easy. The hard part is to understand when this new abstraction will help you to deliver the features the business need.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jhanschoo 2y ago
Surely there is a parallel with standardized testing asking the most needlessly ornate prose of its students and then most writing having more value the pialner it is written.
jhanschoo 2y ago
Surely there is a parallel with standardized testing asking the most needlessly ornate prose of its students and then most writing having more value the plainer it is written.