Developers Need to Stop Turning Advice into Rules

Whether it is Goto, DRY, Scrum or Encapsulation, the developer community tends to get fanatical about any sensible advice.

One of my frustrations with observing trends in software development over the last few decades is the tendency for the developer community to become extremists in relation to almost any sensible advice.

DRY, or Don’t Repeat Yourself, is simple, good advice. It states:

“Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system”

When the DRY principle is applied successfully, a modification of any single element of a system does not require a change in other logically unrelated elements.

Fundamentally, it is about data and updates. However, this often gets conflated with “Don’t Reinvent the Wheel.” This drives developers to sometimes avoid writing code for which some library or framework already exists — at almost any cost.

But here is the key problem: It seldom makes sense to maintain and distribute a library with just a small amount of functionality. Quality libraries that have been refined over many years tend to add more and more features. Users will always have requests for “just one more feature.”

This gradually leads to bloat. Thus if you look for “the best library” in solving a particular problem, you can bet it also solves…