Duplication Isn't Always an Anti-Pattern

I'm a fan of the Go proverb "a little copying is better than a little dependency"[1] and also the "rule of three"[2] when designing a shared dependency.

I think the JS developers could take a lesson from the Go proverb. I often write something from scratch to avoid a dependency because of the overhead of maintaining dependencies (or dealing with dependencies that cease to be maintained). If I only need a half dozen lines of code, I'm not going to import a dependency with a couple hundred lines of code, including lots of features I don't need.

The "rule of three" helps avoid premature abstractions. Put the code directly in your project instead of in a library the first time. The second time, copy what you need. And the third time, figure out what's common between all the uses, and then build the abstraction that fits all the projects. The avoids over-optimizing on a single use case and refactoring/deprecating APIs that are already in use.

[1]: https://go-proverbs.github.io/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_progra...