> But you will never be so productive in the face of changing requirements.
I couldn't disagree more. Failing to represent each piece of knowledge from the requirements in a single authoritative place means that simple requirements changes often have massive costs, as instead of one change to the place where the changed element is unambiguously represented, you need to change all the distributed locations where it is (often opaquely/implicitly) embedded in logic.
The problem is when DRY gets misinterpreted as “never write generally similar-looking code” rather than “every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.”
I couldn't disagree more. Failing to represent each piece of knowledge from the requirements in a single authoritative place means that simple requirements changes often have massive costs, as instead of one change to the place where the changed element is unambiguously represented, you need to change all the distributed locations where it is (often opaquely/implicitly) embedded in logic.
The problem is when DRY gets misinterpreted as “never write generally similar-looking code” rather than “every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.”