DRY is a problem because it's so catchy and seems so self-explanatory. The original formulation of DRY spoke in terms of information. Any piece of information

DRY is a problem because it's so catchy and seems so self-explanatory. The original formulation of DRY spoke in terms of information. Any piece of information should exist in exactly one place in your code. As I've said before, modulo some caveats related to double-entry bookkeeping, this seems exactly right. An inveighing against anything that looks repetitive is not. The goal is not compression, it's ease of understanding and ease of making correct modifications. I've started using "Huffman coding" to refer to the practice of misapplying DRY by deduplicating superficial similarity rather than information content.