I think the DRY in popular mind-share (where it seems largely syntactic) is substantially less valuable than the original formulation, which spoke of "pieces of

I think the DRY in popular mind-share (where it seems largely syntactic) is substantially less valuable than the original formulation, which spoke of "pieces of knowledge". There are (at least) two ways the two differ: First, stating the same thing in many different forms is not DRY, even if it doesn't look like repetition. If the piece of knowledge is "there is a button there", then saying so in HTML and JS and CSS isn't DRY. Second, something might look like repetition but in fact be representing different "pieces of knowledge" in each place. Unifying them is not "more DRY".