Code Snippets Encourage Duplicated Code

VisualStudio CodeSnippets?EncourageDuplicatedCode!

One often sees people using VisualStudio's CodeSnippets? feature in demos to demonstrate the high productivity of the environment by using this templating feature to plug in tedious, detailed and/or repetitive code. The problem is that this is often exactly the kind of code that really needs to be extracted into reusable methods and functions, to reduce the cost of maintaining all that excessive and highly duplicated code. The cost of maintaining code is often about an order of magnitude greater than the cost of developing it in the first place, so making code generation more productive at the cost of increased maintenance costs is a big losing proposition.

"Just stop it!"

See also:

• DanijelArsenovski?'s "Why Code Snippets Are Not My Cup of Tea" article at http://danijelarsenovski.sys-con.com/node/584957
• ThreeStrikesAndYouRefactor
• CodeGenerationIsaDesignSmell

Possible counter point(s):

• StaffingEconomicsVersusTheoreticalElegance