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Comment by valine | Hacker News Reader

There is substantial technical debt introduced by copy and pasting code. I've made a rule for myself: Never paste more than three lines of code at once. It forces me to understand the code I'm copying, and it keeps my work tidy.

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That, or if you really have to use more, have a standard comment to mark such occasions so you can come back later and understand/fix it.

  // voodoo magic from stackoverflow starts here (link: ...)

> so you can come back later and understand/fix it

But, of course, that's very unlikely to happen.

Sure it does. Right when you're writing/updating the documentation.

I think you would come back to it when you're having a critical issue impacting lots of users and to fix it, you finally need to understand that code.

Exactly, it means the same thing, never.

I maintain a rather large code base and have found several

    // FIXME

comments in random places, put there by people who no longer work here.

The trick to copying and pasting is doing it when it won't be you paying back the debt.

Just like how the US economy works.

Even just retyping the exact code helps me quite a bit.

Good idea.

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