Comments on: multiple return values and refactoring javascript

By: Coding: Generalising too early at Mark Needham

Coding: Generalising too early at Mark Needham — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 07:13:20 +0000

[...] Cameron, who first taught me this approach, recently wrote a post describing how he removed some duplication in JavaScript code and you can see from the initial example in his post that he waited until he was exactly sure [...]

By: DCam

DCam — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:33:06 +0000

That’s very true! I think I’m pretty deep in to a habit of only removing duplication once I have at least about 3 example of it in front of me. It’s a bit more typing up front, but typing is not the bottleneck in software development. Or so I’ve heard.

Once I do get around to eliminating the duplication, it’s usually a single regex to get all the call sites sorted out. I think that micro-automation makes the approach efficient enough to be viable. Not to mention the efficiency of getting the code done well.

By: Mark Needham

Mark Needham — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:09:54 +0000

Another thing you seem to have done quite well with this example is to not try and pull out the duplication too early but to instead let it stay there until a more obvious pattern of duplication emerges.

Pulling the duplication out too early as you point out seems to make the code way less ‘malleable’ and it’s then much more difficult to drive it to where you want to go.

Interesting post though, good stuff.