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A younger self used to be very strict about DRY.

For a living codebase, nowadays my general rule of thumb is to consciusly duplicate code until it covers 3 different cases, and only then refactor (unless the DRY way is as fast and obvious).

It takes more than that to yield spaghetti and a lot of time is saved on premature generalization. Plus the generalization is often way more straightforward once the explicit cases are already implemented.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_progra...

I follow this too for "style" refactorings.




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