The famous three R of the Reduce Reuse Recycle motto are very much used in the enviroment field, but they can also be applied to the programming world.
A good programmer takes care of the ecology of his own application, since the code of the application is the enviroment where he spends a lot of his working time. If the application is developed respecting the enviroment where it runs, it is surely an advantage for the whole virtual ecosystem.

Reduce: reducing the code. It seems strange, but it is often more difficult cancelling some code than adding some new one. Adding too much code is often due to overengineering, by implementing functions that are not stricly necessay, and that do not give an additional value to the final customer. It just contribute to pollute the application, making it difficult to maintain. Therefore reduce the code dimension brings to remarkable results: simplification of codebase, ease of maintainance, and in general an improvement of performance.

Reuse: do not invent the WHEEL every time. Writing classes that can be used again or using library of third parts that already do the requested task, is a good habit. Using a class, that was already writtne, brings advantages boths in terms of realization time than in terms of debugging time (hoping that the class you are reusing is bug free…)

Recycle: it may sometime happen that a class could be reused, but it is not exactly as we need. So, sometimes by using CTRL-C, CTRL-V you just introduce duplications and polluted code. If you do some refactoring you could reuse a part of the code already written adapting it to the new application. Also in this case the advantages are a lot: the quantity of the code we are adding is lower, we avoid to create classes that are too alike (or even identical) and of course we spare time and we do not pollute.

I like this idea of the enviromentalist code, as in general all the enviromentalist attitude.

What do you think about it? Do you feel code enviromentalist?