[Nevolihs]

Does it? Every time I see DRY'd code, it usually makes the project it's in more difficult to understand. It's harder to understand where values come from, where values are changed, what parts of the codebase affect what. And that's before trying to figure out where to change something in the right place, because it's often unclear what other parts of the code are coupled to it through all the abstractions.

At a high level, at first glance, the code might look good and it "makes sense". But once you want to understand what's happening and why, you're jumping through five different classes, two dozen methods and you still don't know for sure until you run a test request against the API and see what shows up where in the debugger. And you realize your initial glimpse of understanding was just window dressing and actually nothing makes sense unless you understand every level of the abstractions being used.

It's suddenly a puzzle to understand another software developer instead of software engineering.

[hnick]

An IDE can help a lot. Coming from Perl, everything you said was true. I wanted everything in one file as much as possible, and breaking tasks off into functions just meant I had to jump around to try and rebuild the flow in my head. I spent so much time inside the debugger since reading the code would only go so far.

Now I work in C#, we have a lot of classes with a few functions, a lot of helper functions. Doesn't matter since it's so easy to use the tooling to build a mental picture - let alone refactor it in an instant if that variable name feels a bit off, or we think a function is not used (such things were always a risky exercise in Perl).

We refactored one insurance based project to use generic base classes extensively since all insurance shares some attributes and features - this really helped cut down complexity of changes and overall just reduced code on the screen to sift through. I had a lot of fun doing this, I'm a weirdo who almost likes deleting code more than writing it. Once you hit the lowest level it is a little less intuitive due to being generic but at the higher levels we mostly work at, it's simpler, and rolling out a new product we get a lot of stuff for free. They got a long way copy-pasting the product logic (4 or 5 product lines) but at this point it made sense to revisit, and I sneak a bit more in each time I have a change to do.