Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more likely that your "great programmers" simply understand the difference between the same functionality and accidentally similar functionality. The latter is where you have two use cases that are very similar, so you spend all this time deduplicating. Then one of the use cases changes... The correct response would be to duplicate the code again, because the two use cases are no longer similar. In reali…
Thank you for putting that into words, and rather few too. I have only felt that anti-pattern before, not had words for it. Does it have a name? If not, we should give it a name!
I believe this pattern is referred to as accidental-duplication. Some existing discussions on this:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3000...