3 ms·

It's frightening to see how many of these are errors which are solely created due to copy-pasting - they could have been avoided rather easily by a bit of think

by stinos 12y ago

It's frightening to see how many of these are errors which are solely created due to copy-pasting - they could have been avoided rather easily by a bit of thinking and applying common good practices (typically storing functionality in a function and/or using a loop would already fix like 90% of these, aka DRY), instead of the lazy but easy 'solution' of copy-pasting. One of the first things a programming guru told me was basically: whenever you are ready to hit Crl-C/Ctrl-V (or Ctrl-D or whatever 'duplicate' is in your editor) you shall ask yourself if you are not going to violate the all-important DRY rule. Ignorant and stubborn as I was at the time being I was like 'pfffft what can be wrong with some copy-pasting'. As I learned through the years and is shown by this quiz: a whole lot obviously. It can not be stressed enough how important and widely applicable yet so simple DRY principle is. So as a call-out to all programmers who haven't learnt the habit yet: please think twice or more before even considering copy-pasting.

overgard 12y ago
You're not wrong, per se, but C++'s memory model tends to make refactoring this sort of thing a lot more painful than needed. If you introduce function you have to spend a lot of time thinking about how do the variables copy over the stack, is this data structure safe to pass to a function? And do I pass by reference? And do you return values from the stack or in allocated memory or write into a passed reference? Or do you get really gross and write a macro? And so on, until you just think "fuck it, copy-paste". It's not an excuse, but languages definitely shape how you think, and C++ definitely encourages long functions and copy pasta.
- shadowfox 12y ago
  I don't disagree with you per se. But I think you may be overstating the case. Once you are a C++ programmer for a while, you start to discern "standard" patterns for this sort of thing and tend to automatically use them. (The patterns might depend on the C++ version and to an extent the code base in question; but it is common to have such helper function take a const ref as input, return non-primitive return values via a out-parameter etc). So while C++ might "encourage long functions", I think that may be the case only for newbies to the language. Once you have a some experience working with it, you no longer need to put that much thought in to every little decision.

by stinos 12y ago

overgard 12y ago

You're not wrong, per se, but C++'s memory model tends to make refactoring this sort of thing a lot more painful than needed. If you introduce function you have to spend a lot of time thinking about how do the variables copy over the stack, is this data structure safe to pass to a function? And do I pass by reference? And do you return values from the stack or in allocated memory or write into a passed reference? Or do you get really gross and write a macro? And so on, until you just think "fuck it, copy-paste". It's not an excuse, but languages definitely shape how you think, and C++ definitely encourages long functions and copy pasta.

shadowfox 12y ago
I don't disagree with you per se. But I think you may be overstating the case. Once you are a C++ programmer for a while, you start to discern "standard" patterns for this sort of thing and tend to automatically use them. (The patterns might depend on the C++ version and to an extent the code base in question; but it is common to have such helper function take a const ref as input, return non-primitive return values via a out-parameter etc). So while C++ might "encourage long functions", I think that may be the case only for newbies to the language. Once you have a some experience working with it, you no longer need to put that much thought in to every little decision.