Last night I was reading the classic old book, The Pragmatic Programmer, and came across this definition of DRY, an acronym that stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself:
“Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.”
That’s well stated, especially after a recent experience in which I found some code where I created an “Add Widget” dialog in a different way than I created its related “Edit Widget” dialog. I created the main pane of the dialog the same way, but I managed the details of the two dialogs that contained that pane differently, and I realized what I had done when I decided to make the dialog resizable. When I discovered what I had done, I refactored the code so both the Add and Edit dialogs were created by a single method.
