Personally, I think the best code is the code I don't write.
A significant part of my refactoring, is removing as much code as possible, by tweaking algorithms, deriving common base classes, and removing unused code branches.
Every line of code is a potential bug. The less code, the less bugs.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
My favorite was replacing a function call with a single character constant.
Then there were two employers who demanded code proliferation (management incentives tied to KLOCs?). Didn't last long at either place.
(start at 20:05 if timestamp fails).
Aka, that you could clone Harry Potter's plot, characters, and story while not copying each word of the book verbatim, and it still be a copy of Harry Potter.
Would that be a copyright infringement? Probably just trademark infringement at that point?
Or in other words, a tiny fraction of the original work would essentially be allowed to monopolize the entire space of works involving magical kids going to school.
(And this is why Justice Thomas is widely regarded as the least competent justice of at least the past half century.)
Well, "dollars / year", if you work in an industry where you can directly A-B test against revenue, but I think most of us are happiest not knowing whether our particular lines of code are EV-positive.
