Pasting Code Is OK

While reading about the DRY principle (for “Don’t repeat yourself”) and the evil of copy-and-paste coding (again), I started thinking what to do instead. Actually, what to do is more or less obvious: Put the code into a place where its accessible to be reused — a method, may be in a new or existing module or class.

So, whenever I feel the ‘need’ to copy code, I now think about cutting it, creating a new method and calling that. Apart form avoiding duplication, the code is now testable immediately by calling the method (instead of getting the surrounding code exercised). And the methods using the code gets shorter.

In the end, it boils down to pasting code being perfectly OK, it’s the copying that causes the trouble.