> If programmers were paid for lines of code, copy-pasting would be best practice, and all kind of verbosity and unnecessary code or boilerplate, even dead code would be everywhere.
Huh. Is that what it "would be" like.
Huh. Is that what it "would be" like.
If you're doing the same thing in two places, ok, if you are doing the same thing in three places, refactor.
Let's me get away with copy pasting while I'm quickly prototyping something out, but reminds me that I need to clean it up before I try to iterate again. Plus, it's unlikely that I'll hit the right abstraction on the first or second time I see a problem. Better to wait until I've seen it three times before refactor.
I think any kind of skullduggery is fair game at this stage when you just want to "get it to work". For me the rule of thumb to go beyond this point is the commit (or push if I'm using git). After that point you lose control of it. Other people see it, and start to poke around and change things and retrospectively delivering on your good intentions to provide "done" code becomes more difficult. Always do a personal review before letting your code out of it's box. Of course if you can find somebody who's interested get their feedback too ...
I've been doing mostly front end JS work the last year (as opposed to dabbling), and whenever I have to go back to do Java stuff again, it's really painful.
But hey, we got static types, right? So we "know" our code has few if any bugs in it. (riiiiiiiight)