[mjbellantoni]

This sounds like a rule-of-thumb for making sure bugs get fixed in one place but not another. :)

Seriously though, this article got me to thinking and I realized that why would one live with the smell of copy-and-paste when it's just so darn easy to write a singly reusable function?

I agree with what you in the sense that there's no need to go from what might be a few lines of copied code to a full-blown library or subsystem. But for a small bit of common code not refactoring that out immediately seems to me a really bad practice.

[chipsy]

If you factor too early you end up with a function that takes ten parameters. Sometimes cut+paste functionality evolves into truly divergent code, and you have to have a "feel" for when it will happen.