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Comment by m12k

I think your example illustrates why it's so important to choose the right way to generalize/share code depending on the circumstances. I've found that when there's a 90% overlap between 2-3 use cases, many people tend to go with "one common code path for all that's shared and then inject the 10% difference in via components/callbacks/config vars". This works reasonably well when the flow of execution is the same and what changes is just the specifics of some of those steps. But if the differences are also in which steps even happen, then in my experience this approach couples the whole thing too tightly and makes it harder to reason about what actually happens in a given configuration.

What I like to do instead is break the shared code paths into a palette of smaller subfunctions/subcomponents and then have each use case have its own high level code path that picks and chooses from these subfunctions: One does ABCDE, another does ACDEX. It makes it supremely easy to reason about what each of them actually do, because they read almost like a recipe. It becomes a sequence of high level steps, some of which are used by several use cases, while others are unique. I've found this way of generalizing is almost "cost free" because it doesn't really couple things at a high level, and it's the kind of readability refactor that you'd often want to do anyway even if the code wasn't being shared.

parent m12k 4 years ago

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