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Writer's pictureKristen
Mar 14, 20211 min read

Sloppy and paste

Updated: Mar 14, 2021


I have used this one for years and years and years. I coined this one back in the days of object-oriented development being a "new thing." My effort at that time was to stop the habits of developers copying and pasting the same code to different areas, instead of taking the time to design an object or piece of functionality for reuse.


If you've ever had to take on a legacy system, you've seen this. It is so common that there is a tool built-in to Visual Studio that analyzes solutions for "Code clones."


Fun fact: One of the current code bases that I am assisting in redesigning actually crashes with memory errors when you try to run this tool, as there are so many that my laptop cannot cache the information with the default settings.


At the advent of C#, we had such an issue with this practice that we actually moved our entire code base to C# from VB to make it NOT POSSIBLE to copy and paste code in this way anymore.


From those experiences, I started referring to this as "sloppy and paste," as it is a practice of sloppy development and will always come back to haunt you.

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