alt Hacker NewsMy metric for that is "does that code MEAN the same thing" or "does it just look the same". Has worked quite well for me so far. I frequently find myself making a copy of some code rather than adding a parameter (most commonly done with code that would get some flag added)
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Brian_K_White • yesterday at 8:47 PM
This right here.
Here we're loading the customer record and updating their discount %
Here we're loading the broker record and updating their commision %
They will have 99% identical code.
It's possible but exceedingly unlikely we have found 2 things that should be a load_record_and_update_percent(file,id,field,val)
Tomorrow the business logic behind one of those will no longer be a simple % and now you have a real mess.
Me too ! I don't follow DRY that much, I'm aware that copy pasting is good enough for a few weeks / months to see how things evolve in the future, and do refactor when it's really needed. That said, how do you know if they mean different things ? For GUI code for example, they do mean the same thing, but there's a good chance the code will evolve in the future so premature refactor are wasted time