☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2020

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  • Boilerplate is bad because it’s fundamentally just noise. When you read the code you want to be able to tell what the purpose of the code is and what the problem it solves. Ideally, code should be expressing that as clearly as possible. Having a lot of boilerplate is typically an indication that the language semantics don’t allow you to express the solution in a clear way and you have to write a lot of incidental code. The more code you have to read the more cognitive overhead there is in understanding it and keeping it all in your head.


  • I find DRY often turns into an antipattern because decoupling is far more important than code reuse in practice. Having a function that supports many different code paths can make it very brittle because any changes to it need to consider all the possible use cases. However, if you have two separate functions that are similar, but can evolve independently then you don’t have that problem. As a rule, it’s better to duplicate code first, and then extract parts that turn out to be general purpose functionality once that’s identified through usage, and to put that code into libraries.