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A friend at work (years ago) introduced me to WET: Write Everything Twice, a cheeky response to DRY enthusiasts. It falls just short of the Rule of Threes (as s

A friend at work (years ago) introduced me to WET: Write Everything Twice, a cheeky response to DRY enthusiasts. It falls just short of the Rule of Threes (as soon as you write it a third time, refactor it out). I think this article does have something going for it. DRY should be about knowledge. Don't repeat yourself by handling tax rates all over, get that into a central place. This is not about turning similar looking blocks of code into a clean single block that handles everything as these tend to actually hurt maintainability (ever see the littering of conditionals in "DRY" code because multiple call sites use the similar code slightly different? Yeah, you did it wrong). Another comment wrote it well by mentioning SPOT: Single Point of Truth. DRY and WET SPOTs. I feel like an analogy is forming that someone more quippy than myself can ferret out.

hinkley 7y ago
DRY tests are. the. worst. Way to lock us into last years’ requirements, bud. This is where DAMP comes in. Descriptive And Meaningful Prose. I should be able to read the test failure message and know what I broke. Barring that, I should be able to read the test (not the whole fucking test file) and tell what I screwed up. Anything else kills momentum, and I just want to get away from your code as fast as possible. Which means more tech debt.
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stinos 7y ago
On the other hand, articles like this or principles like WET don't suddenly make it ok to just go ahead and duplicate code all over the place. It's not like code cannot be knowledge. Depending on the type of code SPOT and (what gets misunderstood as) DRY are totally about the same thing and mean the proper solution is to take those bits of similar code and make them into a function. Anyway, you likely know that already but I just felt information like this needs to be on this page as well to avoid possible beginners reading it might think all duplication is fine :] Because I've seen what happens when code containing the knowlegde gets duplicated and the result was never good and most of the time horrible on all fronts.
contingencies 7y ago
Nice one! Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

hinkley 7y ago

DRY tests are. the. worst. Way to lock us into last years’ requirements, bud. This is where DAMP comes in. Descriptive And Meaningful Prose. I should be able to read the test failure message and know what I broke. Barring that, I should be able to read the test (not the whole fucking test file) and tell what I screwed up. Anything else kills momentum, and I just want to get away from your code as fast as possible. Which means more tech debt.

deleted 7y ago

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stinos 7y ago

On the other hand, articles like this or principles like WET don't suddenly make it ok to just go ahead and duplicate code all over the place. It's not like code cannot be knowledge. Depending on the type of code SPOT and (what gets misunderstood as) DRY are totally about the same thing and mean the proper solution is to take those bits of similar code and make them into a function. Anyway, you likely know that already but I just felt information like this needs to be on this page as well to avoid possible beginners reading it might think all duplication is fine :] Because I've seen what happens when code containing the knowlegde gets duplicated and the result was never good and most of the time horrible on all fronts.

contingencies 7y ago

Nice one! Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup