Rule of three

Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we’ve built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems, but we are almost always wrong.

It is three times as difficult to build reusable components as single use components, and a reusable component should be tried out in three different applications before it will be sufficiently general to accept into a reuse library.

• Reusability
• Software