Re:In Defense of Copy and Paste
by daly on Saturday February 09, 2013 @09:05PM
(#5195095)
I did a self-study on a project that lasted several months. I wrote down everything, including mis-typed characters, grammar errors, syntax errors, and semantic errors. I did a root cause analysis of the result. One general result is that I have a 3% error rate, regardless of activity. In fact I find that the delete key is by far the most important key on the keyboard, representing 3% of all of the characters I type.
One observation is the fully 1/2 of ALL the programming errors I made were due to copy/paste. Your mileage may vary but I doubt it.
Copy/paste is evil but it is so "low level", like the delete key, that you probably don't even think about it.
You may find it worthwhile to do a deep analysis of your personal error rate on some project. It is very enlightening. In fact, we ought to fund studies so we can get industry wide statistics.
One observation is the fully 1/2 of ALL the programming errors I made were due to copy/paste. Your mileage may vary but I doubt it.
Copy/paste is evil but it is so "low level", like the delete key, that you probably don't even think about it.
You may find it worthwhile to do a deep analysis of your personal error rate on some project. It is very enlightening. In fact, we ought to fund studies so we can get industry wide statistics.