Playing unique blade array audio idents on live array switching

[profezzorn]

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On the topic of duplication

If you’ve ever had me review your code, you may have heard me complain about redundant code, cut-n-paste, duplicate states or simply asking you to create a helper function. These are all forms of duplication, but why is that bad exactly? Cut-n-paste coding This is probably the most common form of duplication. It happens when you need something similar to some code you already wrote, so you just copy, paste, make a few modifications, and you’re done, right? wrong The life of a piece of code doesn’t end when you finish writing it. That’s when it begins. Lots of people will read and try to understand the code, it will get modified, copied, printed, read, abused, and, when all else fails… compiled. The life of a piece of code ends when the last copy is deleted. At it’s very simplest, when you cut-and-paste a piece of code, it means that when you want to change some aspect of that code in the future, you now have two places to change. That might not sound so bad, but maybe someone pasted 10 times. Or a hundred? If this happens a lot, suddenly, nobody wants to ever touch the code again. Normally, the solution is to move the repeated code into a function or class, and then replace those bits that change with variables so that you can just call a function 10 times instead of pasting the same code 10 times. This still causes some amount of duplication, but learning how to minimize the duplicated part is part of becoming a good programmer. Redundant code Another form of duplication is redundant code. This happens when the programmer doesn’t know the code well enough to say “this cannot happen”, so they insert code that deals with those cases. A lot of times, people later learn that those things cannot happen, but are too lazy to actually remove the redundant code. I mean, what’s the harm? It can’t happen, so the code never runs anyways, right? while this is true, it is also wrong There is a saying, that code gets read more often by people than by compilers. I don’t actually think that is true, but I care a lot more about people than I do about compilers. When you read code that has redundancies in it, it makes you go: what? why is this here? can this happen? Let me go back and read it again to see if I understand it correctly… Often the offending code is small, maybe a single line, but it can slow down the reader significantly. Perfect code (which doesn’t exist, but let’s pretend for now…) should be easy to read. A reader should be able to read the file fr…