DRY was introduced in the Pragmatic Programmer, and Dave Thomas pointed out in a recent Changelog episode that DRY doesn't mean "Don't repeat code", it means "D

DRY was introduced in the Pragmatic Programmer, and Dave Thomas pointed out in a recent Changelog episode that DRY doesn't mean "Don't repeat code", it means "Don't repeat knowledge." One concrete example: If your software has to create really complex objects, would you rather describe _how_ to create those objects in 10 places or one place? That's a scenario where you don't want to repeat yourself. Dan Abramov [wrote about](https://overreacted.io/goodbye-clean-code/ https://overreacted.io/goodbye-clean-code/) this (linked in the OP), but in his example he's removing repetitive code. He's not removing multiple copies of the _knowledge_ about what the program is supposed to do. It's a subtle difference that seems more difficult to describe than I'd like, but it's an important one.