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But people don't stay novices after years/decades. Of course when you write the boilerplate for the 20x time maybe you still accept that, but when you write it for the 2000x time, I bet you do the lazy thing and just copy it.

> cannot for legal reasons or ...

Sure, you can't copy trade secrets, but that's also not the boilerplate part. Copying e.g. a class hierarchy and renaming all the names and replacing the class contents that represent the domain, won't be a legal problem, because this is not original in the first place.


> But people don't stay novices after years/decades

Some absolutely do. I know programmers who entered web development at the same time as me, and now after decades they're still creating typical CRUD applications for whatever their client today is, using the same frameworks and languages. If it works, makes enough money and you're happy, why change?

> Copying e.g. a class hierarchy and renaming all the names and replacing the class contents that represent the domain, won't be a legal problem, because this is not original in the first place.

Some code you produce for others definitively fall under their control, but obviously depends on the contracts and the laws of the country you're in. But I've written code for others that I couldn't just "abstract into a FOSS library and use in this project", even if it wasn't trade secrets or what not, just some utility for reducing boilerplate.

> "abstract into a FOSS library and use in this project"

That is not what I meant. My idea was more like "copy ten lines from this project, then lines from that project, the class from here, but replace every line before the commit ...".

I shouldn't have used the word library, as I did not mean output from the linker, but rather a colloquial meaning of a loose connection of snippets.

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