[colechristensen]

Ehh, people who are really excited about DRY write unreadable convoluted code, where the bulk of the code is abstractions invented to avoid rewriting a small amount of code and unless you're very familiar with the codebase reasoning about what it actually does is a mystery because related pieces of functionality are very far away from each other.

[trey-jones]

DRY is not to avoid writing code (of any amount). DRY is a maintainability feature. "Unless you're very familiar with the code" you probably won't remember that you have to make this change in two places instead of one. DRY makes life easier for future you, and anyone else unfortunate to encounter (y)our mess.

[colechristensen]

Making maintainable code is a good goal.

DRY is one step removed from that goal and people use it to make very unmaintainable code because they confuse any repeated code with unmaintainability. (or their theory that some day we might want to repeat this code so we might as well pre-DRY it)

The result is often a horrendous complex mess. Imagine a cookbook with a cookie recipe that resided on 47 different pages (40 of which were pointers on where to find other pointers on where to find other pointers on where to find a step) in attempts to never write the same step twice in the whole book or your planned sequels in a 20 volume set.

[chuckadams]

It's almost like there's a "reasonable person" type of standard that's impossible to nail down in a general rule...

[colechristensen]

If you can describe a rule in one sentence it'll probably lead to as much trouble as it fixes.

The problem is zealots. Zealotry doesn't work for indeterminate things that require judgement like "code quality" or "maintainability", but a simple rule like "don't repeat yourself" is easy for a zeal. They take a rule and shut down any argument with "because the rule!"

If you're arguing about code quality and maintainability without one sentence rules then you actually have to make arguments. If the rule is your argument there's no discussion only dogma.

As a result? Easy to distill rules spread fast, breed zealots, and result in bad code.

[bluGill]

You are confusing DRY done as intended vs what DRY looks like in the real world to many people.