Custom and Example

"I thus concluded that it is much more custom and example that persuade us than any certain knowledge, and yet inspite of this the voice of the majority does not afford a proof of any value in truths a little difficult to discover, because such truths are much more likely to have been discovered by one man than by a nation." - Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations

The Basics

Some body I follow on twitter retweeted this tweet from Tim Ottinger:

The reason for writing a function is not to reuse its code, but to name the operation it performs.
— Tim Ottinger (@tottinge) January 22, 2013

My first pompous thought was something like, "how obvious."  I was about to go back to work when a memory hit me out of no where.  I remember very early in my career F5-hacking on some code and thinking about creating a method but worrying about not reusing it, or about someone else reusing it incorrectly, or about the extra lines of code the added syntax would add to my already 1000+ line Windows Form class.

I remember programming like that.  There was a time, not long ago, when I didn't think I should extract a method unless I meant to use it more than once!  And it's weird because I don't remember having the epiphany that took me from where I was then to where I am now.  I once thought A, I now think B, and I don't remember changing my mind.  It's an interesting lesson in the way the mind works.  And it reminded me that everyone was a newbie once, and that most likely, I still am a newbie I just haven't figured it out yet.