[swombat]

Then came the full screen editors. They were a bliss compared to line editors. Really. If you don't believe me try 'edlin' for a day or so. We'll see how you like that. Then you'll be wondering how come any software got written at all for the first 2 decades of computing.

I have been wondering that, actually.

On the topic of the article, luckily, the Rails community (and python, and others) seem to have embraced this idea, under the heading "DRY principle" (Don't Repeat Yourself). There might be a connection between that embrace of DRY and the fact that Ruby/Python afficionados tend to prefer "simpler" text editors (Textmate, Vim, Emacs, Sublime) rather than IDEs.

[mhd]

On the other hand, the Rails community also loves their snippets. And a sufficiently advanced snippet is indistinguishable from copy-and-paste.

[robomc]

Worth noting though that this can go too far the other way. I've definitely written things where, in my refusal to repeat myself, I've made a hard-to-read mess.

Here's an example from when I was very first starting out with ruby:

http://pastie.org/2749772

This is a pretty hard to read piece of code, despite my rambling comments. All done to avoid copying and pasting the same easy-to-follow method ~10 times.

[yxhuvud]

But the problem with this code isn't that there is too little duplication! The trouble wass that your grasp of the language wasn't that good and didn't have any idea of how to organize the code.

[robomc]

So, would you have solved it by a more readable form of metaprogramming? Seems to me it's either that, or copypasta.

(Could still be me being a noob, but I can't see some other architectural means of avoiding a choice between either duplication or tricky-to-read metaprogramming in that case.)