Some people(my friend) think that if you can copy and paste some code it means it is a reusable code. That is wrong in two ways. First, reusable code means that the same code can be used in many different projects, it doesn't say how many times you need it in one project. Secondly, as a rule of thumb, copy pasting in programming is a bad thing(sort of).
In this post I will not talk about reusable code, but rather how to avoid copy pasting. There is actually a very important mechanism for copy pasting in code. That is inheritance. Inheritance helps you copying the same code from one class into a new class, without actually having the same code written twice. Lets try to show a code example in C++.
class BaseSpriteDrawer {
public:
void DrawCenter (int x, int y, Texture & t)
{
this->Draw (x-t.GetWidth()/2, y-t.GetHeight()/2, t);
};
virtual void Draw (int x, int y, Texture & t) = 0;
}
class SpriteDrawerA: public BaseSpriteDraw {
public:
void Draw (int x, int y, Texture & t);
};
class SpriteDrawerB: public BaseSpriteDraw {
public:
void Draw (int x, int y, Texture & t);
};
In this example you can see there are two different implementations for drawing sprites. Each one of those have different code for Draw. However, DrawCenter has the same code for both implementations so instead of writing the same code twice for each of the implementations, I have used inheritance. We have "copy pasted" the content of the class BaseSpriteDrawer or "copy pasted" DrawCenter.
The reason copy pasting is bad, is that you have the same code to maintain in two different places. If you discover a bug inside a function, you need to fix all the places you copy pasted that function. You just have more code to maintain, more copies of the same thing to maintain which translates into more work and more bugs.
There is also the additional bonus of saving you a lot of time. Sometimes you need the same code with small variations, and it would seem more work to figure out how to do this with inheritance, instead of just copy pasting and having two copies of the same code. However, in case you need a third copy of the code, with the inherited code it would be a lot easier to create the third "copy" of the code instead of copy pasting the same code for the second time.
If you are a beginner, I suggest you try to avoid copy pasting almost completely. It would be a good exercise or a good challenge to try doing something else each time you have the urge to copy paste some code. That being said, I myself don't completely avoid copy pasting. While as a rule of thumb, its better to avoid copy pasting, sometimes its the fastest immediate solution. The thing is, not all of my code get the same treatment. Some code get better treatment than other code. If its code that is not so important and is not long, then I might copy paste it. I also might copy paste something, and when I see I get back to the same code to add something new, I would fix my bad practice of copy pasting and make a better, cleaner code.
There is a lot more to talk about this subject, and a lot more examples and techniques of how to avoid copy pasting. Copy pasting is actually implied from spartan programming, I have already mentioned spartan programming and I hope to talk about it in future posts.
