Goodbye, Clean Code

I’ve usually heard this phenomenon called “incidental duplication,” and it’s something I find myself teaching junior engineers about quite often. There are a lot of situations where 3-5 lines of many methods follow basically the same pattern, and it can be aggravating to look at. “Don’t repeat yourself!” Right? So you try to extract that boilerplate into a method, and it’s fine until the very next change. Then you need to start passing options and configuration into your helper method…

Code duplication sometimes is a good thing but it doesn't prove that clean code is a bad thing. I think you overcommitted a bit on the refactor, if you had replaced those "10 repetitive lines of math" with a function it would have been cleaner. Let's be crystal clear about it, your teammate did a terrible job not creating a function for those 10 repetitive lines. I would be rejecting this PR but never rewriting it. Rewriting a PR is…

"Firstly, I didn’t talk to the person who wrote it. I rewrote the code and checked it in without their input. Even if it was an improvement (which I don’t believe anymore), this is a terrible way to go about it." While undeniably true, this feels completely orthogonal to the question of clean code. You could ruffle someone's feathers in the exact same way by taking code into the opposite direction. "Goodbye, Clean Code [...] Don’t be a clean code…

I think the original refactoring was right and the the author's position today is wrong.