> Mistake 3: Strawman argument. DRY does NOT lead to over-complicating things. Overcomplicating things leads to overcomplicating things. Sure, I agree, except

> Mistake 3: Strawman argument. DRY does NOT lead to over-complicating things. Overcomplicating things leads to overcomplicating things. Sure, I agree, except DRY is probably the second greatest gateway drug to overcomplicating things to OOP. Actually, they really hand-in-hand since OOP features are often used to DRY things. DRY can easily go too far because fundamentally it's about centralizing ideas with the premise that different operations can and should share units, even though a "writeSomeFileToDisk" function doesn't necessarily have to do the exact same thing between different higher-level operations. Because so many engineers emphasize "elegance", if a set of functions seem similar enough, they pressure themselves to write code that is shareable, hence more abstract. Abstractions are inherently more complicated and hard to understand, not the other way around. Rather than having very simple "molecules" of code that can be understood on their own, there is instead a much larger molecule of nodes that are connected by abstract dependencies, and those nodes may only have dependencies in common. DRY should be done sensibly, but teaching DRY is a problem in our industry because we don't teach engineering discipline. We teach principles like DRY and OOP, and even YAGNI as if they are tenets of a religion.