“Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system” is the verbatim definition of DRY from when the DRY principle was first articulated.
But why call it "Don't Repeat Yourself" if it actually means something somewhat more subtle than that. I firmly believe many junior developers don't grasp the nuance and based on the comments I'm not the only one who thinks this. So if DRY is widely understood by developers to mean literally "don't repeat yourself" and nothing more, does it really matter how the formal definition phrases it?
In any event, if SPOT / SST and DRY do mean the exact same thing, I like SPOT / SST better because the names encode the essential concepts of the principle.
Rules are like alarms they draw our attention to some peculiar condition which gives us pause to think about if it's kosher and if not why not.
Someone says "never do this" or "always do that" and you can apply those rules with abandon (often leaving a maintenance nightmare in your wake).
There are no rules to programming.
Any principle like this that is applied to code is wrong.
Truth implies facts, knowledge implies understanding the meaning and associated course of actions.
This is the second time in as many days that I've read something purporting to go beyond some original. The one yesterday was "we need more than the four types of documentation." All the examples fit into the four types as originally defined.
In HR training, there was even an entire segment on the "Platinum rule" because the Golden rule isn't good enough. Yet anyone who works to understand the Golden rule to any depth knows that it encompasses every "enhancement" the Platinum rule intends without any of the side effects.
What kind of failure is occurring such that definitions don't function any more, I wonder?
One could also use “SPOTify X” to mean “reducing X to a SPOT”. :)
The mechanism to "SPOT that code out, bro!" can be applying varying techniques for reducing coupling, and tightening cohesion. A proper review on a merge request should be making more specific comments about how, not a hand-wave to say "DRY that sucker up."
One final comment: DRY is three characters, therefore obviously more efficient :p
