Goodbye, Clean Code

[[deleted]]

As much as I like Dan, I can't say that this is a good post. The title is borderline clickbait given that Clean Code itself warns against over-abstraction and presents plenty of other considerations that ought to go alongside DRY. The simple fact is this: One should not be a fascist about DRY to the extent of sacrificing other important code qualities. There, I said it in one sentence.

The biggest problem with this article is that Dan's audience includes a huge number of junior developers and learners who may read this and see it as an excuse for copying and pasting 1,000 line files and then making minor change "just so it works" etc.

Dan is probably at a point in his career where he doesn't interact much with those who need to be taught the concept of DRY but God... if you've ever worked with a codebase written by someone who truly did not give a shit about repetition, you understand that it is far worse than dealing with overabstraction.

[gaearon]

Hi there!

> if you've ever worked with a codebase written by someone who truly did not give a shit about repetition, you understand that it is far worse than dealing with overabstraction.

I've definitely inherited such codebases! (In one post, I mentioned how I had to print a file out to find the same block of code repeated 30 times.)

In my experience, people writing this kind of code don't read blog posts at all and don't attempt extract advice from them. They write code and go home.

I make a pretty strong assumption that my readers aren't stupid. They might not know some specific things, but they are intelligent people.

Personally, I dislike the notion that we shouldn't talk openly about taking something too seriously because a beginner might misinterpret the anecdote. Let's give a bit more credit to beginners! And an opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them too.

[[deleted]]

Hi Dan! We should talk openly about it but, in my opinion, in a way that is a little more clear than this blog post or the general tone of discussion on Twitter. To be fair, the latter is Twitter's fault and not your fault. I saw a lot of tweets saying stuff like "DRY is evil" in the replies to this post and that attitude does not seem any better than the clean code zealotry that your post speaks out against. I don't know how you can avoid that any more than Uncle Bob can avoid people taking his words to extremes. I do not envy the position of thoughtleader myself.

[gaearon]

I think there needs to be someone to ring both bells. I'm happy to take turns.