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> "DRY would say we should combine these together" - "Yeah, but Single Responsibility; while the code is mostly the same, they fundamentally are dealing with di

> "DRY would say we should combine these together" - "Yeah, but Single Responsibility; while the code is mostly the same, they fundamentally are dealing with different things in different contexts" As originally coined, DRY speaks of ensuring every piece of knowledge is encoded once. If pieces of code are "dealing with different things" then those are two pieces of knowledge, and DRY (per that formulation) does not recommend combining them. I agree that there is a prevalent notion of DRY that is more syntactic, but I find that version substantially less useful and so I try (as here) to push back on it. Rather than improving code, it's compressing it; I've joked that we should call it "Huffman coding" when someone tries to collapse unrelated things in ways that will be unmaintainable. Note that it's not just that syntactic DRY sometimes goes to far - it also misses opportunities where the original DRY would recommend finding ways to collapse things: if I'm saying "there's a button here" in my HTML and in my JS and in my CSS, then I'm saying the same thing in three places (even though they look nothing alike) and maybe I should find a way to consolidate. There are, of course, still tradeoffs - maybe the technology to unify the description isn't available, maybe deepening my tech stack makes things less inspectable, &c.

no-s 6y ago
>>I've joked that we should call it "Huffman coding" when someone tries to collapse unrelated things in ways that will be unmaintainable. heheh I've made that joke too, also "let's un-complicate this into a pointless complexity," when its goes over their head.
lostcolony 6y ago
I posted to a sibling comment to yours, but wanted to say here too - at that point it ceases to be a useful statement to ever bring up, because I've never seen a discussion where everyone agreed things were the same 'piece of knowledge', and one side was saying it should be repeated. When I've heard "DRY" trotted out, it's -always- been in a situation where the other side was trying to claim/explain that they were different pieces of knowledge. Hence my statement - it's worth understanding the meaning of the principle, internalizing the lesson, as it were, but then the formulation ceases to be useful.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  Interesting. Our experiences differ dramatically. In my experience, misguided "could this be DRYer" is usually motivated by superficial similarity, and a focus on knowledge is clarifying. (Although as I mentioned, "yes, it's repeated, but given tradeoffs that's the best in this case at least for the moment" is still possible.)
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Oh, no, I'm agreeing with - throwing out the statement, and instead focusing on whether or not it's a shared context, is everything. Once you understand it's the same context, you -know- what to do; you don't need to be reminded that DRY is a virtue

no-s 6y ago

>>I've joked that we should call it "Huffman coding" when someone tries to collapse unrelated things in ways that will be unmaintainable. heheh I've made that joke too, also "let's un-complicate this into a pointless complexity," when its goes over their head.

lostcolony 6y ago

I posted to a sibling comment to yours, but wanted to say here too - at that point it ceases to be a useful statement to ever bring up, because I've never seen a discussion where everyone agreed things were the same 'piece of knowledge', and one side was saying it should be repeated. When I've heard "DRY" trotted out, it's -always- been in a situation where the other side was trying to claim/explain that they were different pieces of knowledge. Hence my statement - it's worth understanding the meaning of the principle, internalizing the lesson, as it were, but then the formulation ceases to be useful.

dllthomas 6y ago
Interesting. Our experiences differ dramatically. In my experience, misguided "could this be DRYer" is usually motivated by superficial similarity, and a focus on knowledge is clarifying. (Although as I mentioned, "yes, it's repeated, but given tradeoffs that's the best in this case at least for the moment" is still possible.)
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Oh, no, I'm agreeing with - throwing out the statement, and instead focusing on whether or not it's a shared context, is everything. Once you understand it's the same context, you -know- what to do; you don't need to be reminded that DRY is a virtue