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Comment by bobmaxup | Hacker News Reader

...said no one who inherited the maintenance of hundreds of thousands of lines of copy pasted code.

God I would love that. Are you kidding? I've always hoped I'd get to inherit one. A codebase where each component "vendors" all its dependencies so you can fearlessly make changes and not affect anything else.

You're describing heaven for a maintenance programmer -- I'm only looking at the codebase because there's a bug in some component, I likely even have a stack trace. If can just read what that bit of code does top to bottom, fix the error in just that component, write a test and ship I'll send the original author chocolates.

Sure, that would fix the bug immediately in front of you, but what if the same bug exists in several of the other copies of the dependency? Are you going to be able to track all of the occurrences down? I think that's the big tradeoff.

I'll take that every time, to zeroth order if the bug occurs other places it's free to err other places and I'll deal with it. But if it doesn't then does it matter? If we're experiencing a bug in a specific code-path is the right move to make a change that fixes it in one codepath but potentially changes the currently working n other codepaths that depend on it? If it weren't DRY'd would you bother changing the others? Probably not.

To first order :vimgrep is totally mechanical and brain-off repeat fix is super easy.

It is hard to know if you have fixed or broke something when there are hundreds of distinct variants of it and no way to test its correctness.

Also, not all maintenance involves correcting inborn defects.

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