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(I work mostly on Python, so this is my opinion based on that)

Most of the code that I write that would be duplicating the functionality in a library would be doing so because we don't need the extra functionality. For example, I need to pluralise a small set of words, so I write 3-4 clause if-statement and append some "s" characters because I don't see the need to use python-inflection. The latter is massively more complex, so unlikely to be detected as the same thing.

Sure, there might be a few matches, but I suspect they will mostly be helper functions within libraries, rather than the public API of libraries.

I would prefer not to send code to a web service for detection, although not totally against it. In many companies this would not be allowed, either through policy, firewalls, exfiltration detection systems, or lack of internet on development machines (I know people who work, or have worked myself, in all of these situations).

Something I think would be far more valuable, and possibly more realistic as well, is local detection that highlights possibly duplicated code in a codebase. I find little snippets (1-2 lines) that have been duplicated on a fairly regular basis, and if I could identify those to be extracted out into re-usable methods, that would be amazing.

Would I pay money for it? Probably not, it's not that much of a problem, and all those sorts of tools are usually open source anyway. Unfortunately that's my expectation now.



All valid concerns.

I guess the best way to address the usefulness issue is to run it against popular frameworks, like React or Angular, and see what happens.

If it proves useful (like say 10% of code could be replaced by existing functions), would you change your mind?




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