I understand the analogy, but on the other hand, the barrier to using a gun for killing people is nearly infinitely higher (I hope) than the barrier to using copy & paste to "just fix this little thing here".
So many times, when you need a quick solution for a small problem and you know that you have fixed this exact same problem a few weeks/months ago at a different spot, there's a huge temptation to just go and copy&paste those lines.
By doing so, you have just created debt. What if that code is using some API that you want to change a few years later? Whoever is going through the old code now has to fix up all instances of your copy & paste action.
What if the initial code contained a bug that somebody else fixed? They might not know about the copy pasta. It's very likely that they only fix the initial instance of the code and not all other places where it was pasted to, so the bug partially remains, or, worse, is later classified as a regression (which it's not).
So, coming back to your analogy, hating copy & paste is analogous for hating guns not only for their potential of killing people but also for their potential for causing accidents and for their potential to use them for any kind of potentially non-violent crime.
As the guy who is usually doing the refactorings to our 7 year old codebase, I'm the guy who is suffering from copy pasta and I'm telling you: I totally agree with the original article. I've yet to see a single instance where copy & paste of more than a single line of code didn't cause me non-insignificant amounts of additional work.
That is spot on. But blaming text editors and IDEs is a missed shot. If the author blames the editor I'm temped to think that he himself resources to copy paste because he as his editor to blame.
So many times, when you need a quick solution for a small problem and you know that you have fixed this exact same problem a few weeks/months ago at a different spot, there's a huge temptation to just go and copy&paste those lines.
By doing so, you have just created debt. What if that code is using some API that you want to change a few years later? Whoever is going through the old code now has to fix up all instances of your copy & paste action.
What if the initial code contained a bug that somebody else fixed? They might not know about the copy pasta. It's very likely that they only fix the initial instance of the code and not all other places where it was pasted to, so the bug partially remains, or, worse, is later classified as a regression (which it's not).
So, coming back to your analogy, hating copy & paste is analogous for hating guns not only for their potential of killing people but also for their potential for causing accidents and for their potential to use them for any kind of potentially non-violent crime.
As the guy who is usually doing the refactorings to our 7 year old codebase, I'm the guy who is suffering from copy pasta and I'm telling you: I totally agree with the original article. I've yet to see a single instance where copy & paste of more than a single line of code didn't cause me non-insignificant amounts of additional work.