"A little copying is better than a little dependency."
this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
162 points (97.6% liked)
Programmer Humor
31616 readers
128 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Judgement call. When it's something prone to change that's hard to get right, duplicating it just creates more maintenance burden.
For sure. But I've seen a lot more sins committed in the name of reusing code than in the name of minimizing dependencies.
Plus, it's bloat. A snippet of extra code isn't going to cause much trouble, but then you end up doing it a lot, and there's snippets in the snippets, and all the sudden something that used to fit on a floppy is 3 gigs.
I have no idea how much of a factor this is relative other various performance-sacrificing shortcuts, but Wirth's law is a thing.
When I do a security audit on apps with hundreds of dependencies, I die a little bit
Does it matter what kind of dependancy? Like, sure, if it's somebody's 5-year-old school project that's bad, I guess. (I'm experiencing this meme right now)
Depend on abstractions. This isn't hard. 🤷
Reuse is only good in the context of 90s era OO programming wisdom of "Coupling is bad, cohesion is good".
Wait so I should reinvent the wheel constantly! I knew I was right about that!!
I also think an implementation should depend on how many the developer remembers to change