[Rd] legitimate use of :::

Hadley Wickham h.wickham at gmail.com
Fri Aug 23 00:00:54 CEST 2013


On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Brian Rowe <rowe at muxspace.com> wrote:
> Another point to consider is that copying someone else's code forces you to become a maintainer of the copied code. If there are any bug fixes/enhancements/what-have-you in the original you won't get those updates. So now you own the copied code and need to consider the cost of the codebase diverging (from the original).

Sometimes that's a good thing - you're equally insulated from the
original maintainer changing the function to work in a way that you
don't like.  Again, I'm not arguing that copy-and-paste is necessarily
the right solution, but it's not necessarily the wrong solution either
- it depends on the context.

Hadley

-- 
Chief Scientist, RStudio
http://had.co.nz/



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