When you say "DRY" here, would you say you had familiarity with the original definition, or merely what you (quite understandably) inferred from the acronym? Because I think the formulation in The Pragmatic Programmer is pretty spot on in speaking about not repeating "pieces of information", whereas I find in practice most people are reacting to superficial similarity (which may or may not reflect a deeper connection).
Looking at the definition, I do believe I wasn't referring to the original definition. I didn't actually know that original definition was specifically limited to the information/knowledge part. I have to assume there's industry wide misunderstanding on this term?
To avoid the confusion, it seems like DRY would be better named something like "Single source of truth". Because I do agree with that.
> I have to assume there's industry wide misunderstanding on this term?
The "misunderstanding" is at least as prevalent as the original, yes. I wasn't trying to say the original is "correct" - language is determined by usage - just wondering which you were discussing.
> To avoid the confusion, it seems like DRY would be better named something like "Single source of truth".
It could probably do with a better name, but "single source of truth" is usually about the information operated on by the program, rather than information embodied in the program.
You mean it's databases rather than what is in code?
If so, then that's also news to me. I'd have thought that e.g. something like input validation code that can be reused both in backend and client would go under single source of truth. Which I would always prefer not to be repeated, but frequently hard to do unless you have same language in backend and frontend or codegen.
When you say "DRY" here, would you say you had familiarity with the original definition, or merely what you (quite understandably) inferred from the acronym? Because I think the formulation in The Pragmatic Programmer is pretty spot on in speaking about not repeating "pieces of information", whereas I find in practice most people are reacting to superficial similarity (which may or may not reflect a deeper connection).