Why do so many developers get DRY wrong?
Dan Abramov’s excellent Goodbye, Clean Code post (wherein he learned it was wise to walk back an overzealous refactoring) reminded me of something Dave Thomas said when we interviewed him and Andy Hunt about the Pragmatic Programmer’s 20th edition:
We’ve also looked at the reaction to various parts of the book, and discovered that we weren’t really communicating as well as we thought we were some of the ideas that we had. A classic one is DRY. DRY has come to mean “Don’t cut and paste”, but the original “Don’t repeat yourself” was nothing to do with code, it was to do with knowledge. So we’ve had to go through and update that… [🎧]
Source: Why do so many developers get DRY wrong?, an article by Jerod Santo.