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1468 points nromiun | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.247s | source
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exclipy ◴[] No.45077894[source]
This was my main takeaway from A Philosophy Of Software Design by John Ousterhout. It is the best book on this subject and I recommend it to every software developer.

Basically, you should aim to minimise complexity in software design, but importantly, complexity is defined as "how difficult is it to make changes to it". "How difficult" is largely determined by the amount of cognitive load necessary to understand it.

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bsenftner ◴[] No.45077954[source]
Which is why I consider DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) to be an anti-rule until an application is fairly well understood and multiple versions exist. DO repeat yourself, and do not create some smart version of what you think the problem is before you're attempting the 3rd version. Version 1 is how you figure out the problem space, version 2 is how you figure out your solution as a maintainable dynamic thing within a changing tech landscape, and version 3 is when DRY is look at for the first time for that application.
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zahlman ◴[] No.45078299[source]
DRY isn't about not reimplementing things; it's about not literally copying and pasting code. Which I have seen all the time, and which some might find easier now but will definitely make the system harder to change (correctly) at some point later on.
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ryeats ◴[] No.45078493[source]
This is a trap junior devs fall into DRY isn't free it can be premature optimization since in order to avoid copying code you often add both an abstraction AND couple components together that are logically separate. The issues are at some point they may have slightly different requirements and if done repeatedly you can get to a point that you have all these small layers of abstraction that are cross cutting concerns and making changes have a bigger blast radius than you can intuit easily.
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zahlman ◴[] No.45078700[source]
If you notice that two parts of the code look similar, but have a good reason not to merge or refactor, that deserves a signpost comment.

If you're copying and pasting something, there probably isn't a good reason for that. (The best common reason I can think of is "the language / framework demands so much boilerplate to reuse this little bit of code that it's a net loss" — which is still a bad feeling.)

If you rewrite something without noticing that you're doing so, something has definitely gone wrong.

If a client's requirements change to the point where you can't accommodate them in the nicely refactored function (or to the point where doing so would create an abomination) — then you can make the separate, similar looking version.

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smallnamespace ◴[] No.45078878[source]
> If you're copying and pasting something, there probably isn't a good reason for that.

I would embrace copying and pasting for functionality that I want to be identical in two places right now, but I’m not sure ought to be identical in the future.

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1. fauigerzigerk ◴[] No.45082725[source]
I agree completely. DRY shouldn't be a compression algorithm.

If two countries happen to calculate some tax in the same way at a particular time, I'm still going to keep those functions separate, because the rules are made by two different parliaments idependently of each other.

Referring to the same function would simply be an incorrect abstraction. It would suggest that one tax calculation should change whenever the other changes.

If, on the other hand, both countries were referring to a common international standard then I would use a shared function to mirror the reference/dependency that they decided to put into their respective laws.