How to Not Make Things Worse

> Like a good compressor, I don’t reuse anything until I have at least two instances of it occurring. Many programmers don’t understand how important this is, and try to write “reusable” code right off the bat, but that is probably one of the biggest mistakes you can make. My mantra is, “make your code usable before you try to make it reusable”.

> I always begin by just typing out exactly what I want to happen in each specific case, without any regard to “correctness” or “abstraction” or any other buzzword, and I get that working. Then, when I find myself doing the same thing a second time somewhere else, that is when I pull out the reusable portion and share it, effectively “compressing” the code. I like “compress” better as an analogy, because it means something useful, as opposed to the often-used “abstracting”, which doesn’t really imply anything useful. Who cares if code is abstract?