@jk So when four things fail, you have to go through the 270 lines of abstract, generic code looking for the correct line to change.

As opposed to fixing it in one of the four places but forgetting the other three.

Meh. It's a subject of debate. I'd still rather have a single place to change it. 🤔

@jk Or just use preprocess contortions. In the end, it's all about keeping things elegant and easy to understand as perceived by whoever wrote it.

@jk

It me.

@jk Real architects start by writing a BeautifulAbstractGenericCodeFactory

@jk

@jk I feel attacked

@jk Why write four lines when you can craft a 270-line epic? After all, every programmer knows that complexity is just simplicity dressed in a tuxedo

@jk I can't tell why but this reminds me on #OpenFOAM 🙄 . The finite volume library is nice and people are able to do stunning things with it, but inherentency hell grows with every solver.

@jk SUBSCRIBE

@jk
If you are pressed to repeat lines of code, you should consider using a better programming language.

@jk terraform modules

@jk @lisamelton why write a conditional statement when you can write a DSL that can operate on any values in any way possible? Future prooooooooooooofffffffffff!

@jk lol. bingo

the horrors I've seen in legacy Java enterprise codebases where it was nearly futile trying to find a section that did a real task *truly* needed by the enduser back in the real world

@jk …and complain that the abstraction leaks.

@jk
Avoid copying a large one-of transposition of mostly static JS to JSON by writing a whole JS parser, which automatically exports JSON.

@seri

@jk ChefsKissAbstractBuilderBuilder

@jk the problem is it usually won't remain 4 lines for a long time. And honestly I'm not experienced enough to predict future complexity.
Writing 270 lines of generic code is easier and safer for me.

@jk one of my ex coworker took my code, decided the bind the cli interface and the HTTP request together because they were two pair of theses. This resulted in a tight coupling, making the code hard to work with, especially for anything else than direct call to the API and left us with no client for our API so other coworker were calling the CLI, written in python, from their code, also python.

That was a factor in choosing to leave the company

@jk Only to discover, when you eventually need a third occurrence, that the beautiful generic abstraction does not fully accommodate that use case and needs serious refactoring.

@jk c++

@jk

Be sure to write a class to abstract integers so they can be short, long, floats or even complex in a transparent and dynamic way. And can be persisted in the cloud, database, text files or clay tablets, depending on how much time you need to keep the data.

You know you need that.

@jk [chuckles]

@jk

My threshold for duplicate code is about 15 lines, and only "near" each other in the same text file.

@jk also make sure the behaviour depends on the return type, which is infered by the compiler for every call site separately.

I'm the opposite. Smithereen, the server app I'm writing this from, now has photo albums and comments on photos in them, and just yesterday I removed all duplication for handling federated likes on different object types. Feels so ✨clean✨ to have all likes end up in one single universal method.