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I love copy & paste! I also defended it in this scholarly article: http://harmonia.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/toomim-linked-editing.pdf http://harmonia.cs.berkeley

• pjungwir 14y ago
  No idea why you were downvoted. That paper looks like it has far more thoughtful things to say than most comments here. :-)
  • gus_massa 14y ago
    I didn't downvote it, but I was just going to skip that comment and continue reading. The comment is too short, apparently slightly off-topic, looks like self promotion and give no reason to look to the linked content. But as you said, this is a good comment! How I would rewrite this comment (with some parts stolen from the abstract and some parts just invented): I love copy & paste! I think that the use of programming abstractions like functions and macros has inherent cognitive costs. A few years ago, as part of my research we proposed "Linked Editing": A technique for managing duplicated source code with the help of the text editor. We implemented it in a prototype editor as a XEmacs extension. More details in this article: http://harmonia.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/toomim-linked-editing.pdf http://harmonia.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/toomim-linked-editing... and we made a video of the editor: http://youtu.be/1wo_7MTdWWI http://youtu.be/1wo_7MTdWWI . P.S.1 I still prefer refactoring to this kind of multiple edition. I use Racket, so I love functions and macros. But sometime they are very complex to edit, so perhaps sometimes this multiple edition can be a good idea. P.S.2 Another possibility is that some users are too eager to downvote. I saw many good comments downvoted, but usually they bounce later.
• blake8086 14y ago
  That is amazing.