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Agreed. I recall a useful rule-of-thumb that states you should wait until the third time you need a bit of code before packaging it into something reusable. Oth
by harto 15y ago
Agreed. I recall a useful rule-of-thumb that states you should wait until the third time you need a bit of code before packaging it into something reusable. Otherwise, you might be wasting your time.
- mjbellantoni 15y agoThis sounds like a rule-of-thumb for making sure bugs get fixed in one place but not another. :) Seriously though, this article got me to thinking and I realized that why would one live with the smell of copy-and-paste when it's just so darn easy to write a singly reusable function? I agree with what you in the sense that there's no need to go from what might be a few lines of copied code to a full-blown library or subsystem. But for a small bit of common code not refactoring that out immediately seems to me a really bad practice.
- chipsy 15y agoIf you factor too early you end up with a function that takes ten parameters. Sometimes cut+paste functionality evolves into truly divergent code, and you have to have a "feel" for when it will happen.