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A comment on Coding is boring, unless. Parent comment

Re:Coding is boring, unless by TeMPOraL on Sunday November 29, 2015 @09:47AM (#10644693)
I would not be surprised to learn that a codebase is 20-50% made of stuff literally copied from SO (with occasional variable name change). Why? Because most work is not that unique. Rare are the jobs where you're building something new in software; usually it's solving slight variations of the same business problem.

In particular, people copy-paste a lot of JS from SO, and again, it's no surprise. Most of the web development isn't done by superstar sexy rocketship startups on the bleeding edge of Node.js ecosystem - it's done by small companies employing barely competent programmers, and it doesn't require any innovation. It's just taking the same components everybody uses, configuring them in the same way everyone configures, and wiring them together in the same way everyone does.

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Re:Coding is boring, unless by nickpsecurity on Sunday November 29, 2015 @06:26PM (#10646608)
This was true way back when people were trying frame-based programming, 4GL's, etc. The same general components could often get the job done. So, the tools made that easy to express along with code generators to turn them into 3GL code (eg C, COBOL) specialized for the task. Both vendors and businesses developed an assortment of reusable components that became a selling point in time saving.

Repeated again in past 10 years with OOP, SOA, micro-services, and so on. Applies to configurations and admin scripts, too, not just code.

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