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Duplication Isn't Always an Anti-Pattern

(medium.com)
52 points birdculture | 1 comments | 02 Dec 25 08:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.302s | source
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brandensilva ◴[07 Dec 25 15:02 UTC] No.46182165[source]▶
I have to agree, it's much easier to remove and consolidate duplicative work than unwind a poor abstraction that is embedded everywhere.

And I think it's easy to see small companies lean on the duplication because it's too easy to screw up abstractions without more engineering heads involved to get it right sometimes.

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StellarScience ◴[07 Dec 25 15:58 UTC] No.46182630[source]▶
> it's much easier to remove and consolidate duplicative work than unwind a poor abstraction that is embedded everywhere.

It's not easy to deduplicate after a few years have passed, and one copy had a bugfix, another got a refactoring improvement, and a third copy got a language modernization.

With poor abstractions, at least you can readily find all the places that the abstraction is used and imorove them. Whereas copy-paste-modified code can be hard to even find.

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1. brandensilva ◴[07 Dec 25 16:59 UTC] No.46183116[source]▶
I feel AI does decent at fixing the dupes and consolidating it as one instance. Abstractions can have far deeper connections and embeddings making it really hard to undo and reform but to each their own on what works for them.