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One thing to keep in mind here... some of those "you can't predict" things are utterly predictable in light of experience. That part can't be faked to well, the

One thing to keep in mind here... some of those "you can't predict" things are utterly predictable in light of experience. That part can't be faked to well, there aren't a good set of rules about it. But experience is a good teacher, and you do eventually learn to be reasonably accurate about when to do C+P vs DRY, even if you can't explain the why of it. I think it comes down to this - when I first learned to code, it was hard enough to keep track of a couple different functions. As experience came, what I could track and reason about and keep in my mental model grew, so now that I've got some experience I can see more of how the whole system will grow and interact. I'm not really smarter per se, but rather I just have more practice as putting it all together.

sanderjd 12y ago
Couldn't agree more. It's definitely a function of the extent to which you're guessing, which is a function of your experience solving very similar problems. I do think we (programmers? people?) have a tendency to avoid inspecting the experience we already have. We thought hard about some pattern a few times and came up with some instincts based on that experience, which is great, but we should make sure to double-check those instincts from time to time.
jdmichal 12y ago
It's actually pretty well predictable if you think about it in terms of encapsulation and core functionality. If this functionality is an external requirement to the purpose of the components, then it absolutely should exist as its own component that coalesces that functionality into a single location. However, if that functionality is core functionality to the components, and they just happen to do the same thing in the same order... Then that's where you'll eventually see divergence if you try to link them to a third component. In those cases, you should either be trying to join the two components into one, or just happily leave them as separate components that just happen to perform some common operations by way of their primary function.

sanderjd 12y ago

Couldn't agree more. It's definitely a function of the extent to which you're guessing, which is a function of your experience solving very similar problems. I do think we (programmers? people?) have a tendency to avoid inspecting the experience we already have. We thought hard about some pattern a few times and came up with some instincts based on that experience, which is great, but we should make sure to double-check those instincts from time to time.

jdmichal 12y ago

It's actually pretty well predictable if you think about it in terms of encapsulation and core functionality. If this functionality is an external requirement to the purpose of the components, then it absolutely should exist as its own component that coalesces that functionality into a single location. However, if that functionality is core functionality to the components, and they just happen to do the same thing in the same order... Then that's where you'll eventually see divergence if you try to link them to a third component. In those cases, you should either be trying to join the two components into one, or just happily leave them as separate components that just happen to perform some common operations by way of their primary function.