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A comment on Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six. Parent comment

Re:Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six by lamontcg on Saturday September 24, 2022 @05:24PM (#32966650)
The point isn't to maintain the repeated code forever. The point is to generate the repeated code and (maybe) live with it for a bit until you understand what the right abstraction is and then remove the duplication with the correct abstraction.

I've lost track of the number of times that I've taken badly abstracted code, reintroduced all the duplication, then refactored to remove the duplication with an entirely different abstraction and the code was many times easier to read.

And have you lived in a codebase for many years, where you've never come back to a method that you extracted and realized that you named it wrong? Or the requirements of the code grew and the duplication wasn't really at the level that you picked and you wind up with a method that grows all kinds of horrible options to change its internal behavior?

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Re:Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six by wizofaus on Saturday September 24, 2022 @10:44PM (#32968502)
I've definitely seen cases where existing code was reused for a secondary, seemingly similar feature, unnecessarily complicating it and creating maintenance headaches when business requirements between the two features later diverged, and at best you might be able to claim it would have been better to simply copy & paste the code and modify it first, then look at how to refactor to avoid obvious cases of duplication. But I wouldn't consider that an example of developers trying to stay DRY at all costs.

Honestly the biggest problem I've had with maintaining the principle of not duplicating code is when a PO and/or UI/UX designer think we should only apply improvements to one feature to reduce the amount of work, when in fact it should be less work to apply them to all.

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