The hard choice between duplication, paralysis and chaosA common programmer credo is “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (Pragmatic Programmer) or “Once and only once” (Extreme Programming). Like all credos, we risk following it even when it is not appropriate.The larger truth is that we have choice between three evils: We can duplicate our code, thus duplicating effort, understanding and being forced to hunt down twice. We can share code and affect everyone who shares the code every time we change to code to better fit our needs. If this is a large number of people, this translates into lots of extra work. If you’re on a large project, you might’ve experienced code storms: Days where you’re unable to get any work done as you’re chasing the consequences of other people’s changes. We can keep shared code unchanging, thus forgoing improvements. Most code I (and I expect, you) write is not initially fit for its purpose, so this means leaving bad code to cause more harm. I expect there is no perfect answer to this dilemma. When the number of people involved is low, we might accept the noise of people changing code that’s used by others. As the number of people in a project grows, this becomes increasingly painful to everyone involved. At some time, large projects start experiencing paralysis. If we’re not happy with the state of the code when paralysis sets in, it might be that there’s really only one option left: To eschew the advice of the masters and duplicate the code. Java