Cloning is good (was Re: How to get the help of @?)

[Israel Herraiz]

Excerpts from Sergei Steshenko's message of Fri Aug 31 20:01:12 +0200 2012:
> This particular example shows that you apparently ignore the "single
> point of change/maintenance" concept, for example, you can read
> about it here: http://www.ifsq.org/single-point-of-maintenance.html

Actually, there are lots of myths about what practices are better for
software engineering. In the particular case of "single point of
maintenance", many open source / free software projects contain more
code cloning than it is usually advised, having the same "point"
repeated and scattered among different files. This has been generally
believed to be a bad thing, but it turns out that the evidence shows
that it might not be that bad, it could even be a good thing for
projects for several developers geographically distributed and
working on parallel at the same time. Have a look at this paper:

 "Cloning considered harmful" considered harmful
 http://maveric0.uwaterloo.ca/~migod/papers/2008/emse08-ClonePatterns.pdf

It would be interesting to grab evidence of this allegedly violated
principle in Octave, and find out whether it is actually harmful or
not. I bet it's not.

Cheers,
Israel

PS: The Michael Godfrey from the paper is not the same as the Octave's
Michael Godfrey (who I don't have the luck to have met in person :).

-- 
Israel Herraiz
Assistant Professor / Profesor Ayudante Doctor
Technical University of Madrid (UPM)
http://mat.caminos.upm.es/~iht/
Tel: +34 91 336 6663