alt Hacker NewsI believe that "single source of truth" is a principle that should always be followed. If there's duplicated code where it'd be a bug if they diverge, then you should refactor. It creates a long-distance coupling in your code that may be invisible to future developers until a bug emerges.
But with that in mind, I mostly agree with the article: if it's not a violation of "single source of truth", then abstractions are just a convenience. If it starts being inconvenient, then it's not doing its job and there's no reason to use it. It's a serious code smell if a function needs several flags for custom behavior; that means it's probably the wrong abstraction or violating the single responsibility principle. If there is a legit need for lots of customization, an often-good way to handle is to take a function/functor as an argument for the customization. E.g., rather than `solve(f:double -> double, max_iters = 99, x_abs_tol = 1e-15, x_rel_tol = 1e-15, ...)` you can do `solve(f:double -> double, stopping_criteria: StoppingCriteriaClass)`
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Code duplication differs from single source of truth applied to data in the sense that data is data but two pieces of code may functionally be the same (they do the same thing) but they might be semantically different in their usage (they’re advertised to achieve different things), in that case coupling them together with deduplication and forcing them to do the same thing doesn’t really make sense, and may make the codebase more difficult to work on in the future (especially in companies where different teams have responsibilities over different parts).
> I believe that "single source of truth" is a principle that should always be followed
Fundamentally, the article addresses cases where it's not clear yet how many sources of truth there will be. Are the two spots in the code using the same algorithm, or slightly different versions? More importantly, will they change for the same sorts of reasons?
The title adage (correctly, imo) argues that making two different things the same will cause you more pain than making two same things different via duplication. In the latter thing case, the "damage" is just having to make the same changes twice, or doing a refactor to introduce the abstraction. In the former case, you have to keep adding to your abstraction, or undo it. Most crucially, it breaks "locality", which is the only property you really care about when making changes. I just want to make this change and not worry about side effects to unrelated parts of the system.
I have always believed what the article more or less states. But you have to remember, the primary and maybe only source of duplication in software is situational dependency (the other word escapes me for this). If there was a universal tree of software functions that could be accessed over a network no function would ever be duplicated and every function would be reused from a central tree. When you put 2+2 inside a method or function body you just duplicated code. or any code inside a method or function body.
This is why we have to have programs that duplicate code by doing anything like adding two numbers together or complex logic that is easy to create bugs when someone wrote it 40 years ago better. Because code reuse is mostly done on a very small scale.
Given thats the case when you start on a new React project as an example you are not reusing application code you are duplicating the react framework so you can duplicate every other web app in every sense except maybe the visual.
There is no such thing as full reuse and until we get to a universal network invocable function tree that can be extended only when its truly unique we never will. Maybe AI will do this. People cannot.
At the end of the day code duplication needs to exist to optimize for local correctness (or incorrectness) and speed and abstractions goal is not to provide pure reuse. Its to provide a place to "put your logic" that may be similar and has access to typical state that some kind of widget might typically need.
Of course, in theory this is true. In practice people tend to avoid ANY duplication no matter what. Especially junior developers, as if duplication would be the root of all evil.