About 13 ago, Django docs formally introduced me to the DRY principal - Don't Repeat Yourself, as in "Don't pollute your project with almost identical pieces of code, but rather refactor them into a shared, reusable code base".
It sounds easy and is indeed something people have doning since at least the Multics days. However trying to enforce this principal on myself was quite a struggle. Whenever I spotted repetetion emerging while writing a code, I felt compelled to refactor it immediately. Needless to say, attempting to build a shared functionality for something still in heavy development is tiresome. The context switch between writing what you want to create and refactoring as you go wore me out heavily.
It took me some time to come terms with the perfectionist in myself that I do not have to DRY, that it's a guide, not a law.
Nowadays, when prototyping, I shamelessly repeat myself. Once I get the core functionality working, I review it and apply the following priciples of my own:
- Readability trumps DRY
- Repeating something twice is totally fine
- If repeating logic appears in thee or more places - I'll refactor it out IF it doesn't sacrifice readbility
- If I can't refactor with sacrificing readability - I probably have to redesign my code all together
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