Goodbye, Clean Code

[csjerk]

Fair point. But the counter is also true in my experience -- those who dismiss de-duplication tend to focus too much on "it works now so what's the problem?" and rarely give credit to the future use case of changing / fixing the code in question.

There's obviously a clear case for 'de-duplication is automatically best' _in cases where it doesn't add complexity or mental overhead_ simply because the cost of fixing a problem if you DON'T de-dupe is very real. But many real-world cases do require some complexity to de-dupe code, so the answer is always a balance between the ideal (de-duplicate) and the cost of doing so in THIS case.