Reusable Code

Remy Porter

Computers were a mistake, which is why I'm trying to shoot them into space. Editor-in-Chief for TDWTF.

Code reuse is one of the key steps to maintainability. There are many ways a developer might make their code reusable. For example, Steve’s co-worker wrote this block, which generates 1000 log entries:

int next = 0;  

List<FeedSearchTransactionLogResult> allDataSimulated = new List<FeedSearchTransactionLogResult>();  

allDataSimulated.Add(new FeedSearchTransactionLogResult(next++));  
allDataSimulated.Add(new FeedSearchTransactionLogResult(next++));  
allDataSimulated.Add(new FeedSearchTransactionLogResult(next++));  
//SNIP skip 995 lines…  
  
allDataSimulated.Add(new FeedSearchTransactionLogResult(next++));  
allDataSimulated.Add(new FeedSearchTransactionLogResult(next++));  
allDataSimulated.Add(new FeedSearchTransactionLogResult(next++));

At least, it might be 1000 log entries. It’s hard to tell. The original developer reused the hell out of that one line of code. This block is easy to modify- if the number of iterations ever changes, a developer simply needs to add or remove the correct number of lines.

Now that’s reusable code.

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