To DRY or not to DRY

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submitted 3 days ago by davel@lemmy.ml

To DRY or not to DRY
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It's the new "promotion machine." The first manager: "I saved this company x dollars using AI, promote me." The new manager: "I increased productivity by x percent getting rid of AI, promote me." Repeat.

"I fired hundreds of employees because a con artists sold me on this new technology, promote me."

It's always the AI. We all know they're pushing the AI button before even reading the rest of the label!

I remember 10 years or so ago working with a guy who was trying to sell me on the wonders of Eclipse. "It writes all this boilerplate for you!" I was more interested in writing in languages that were less shit and required less boilerplate.

C) Write a highly specific, custom-tailored boilerplate generator that does 80% of the work and needs only a day or two to implement.

D) spend millions developing an AI to generate the boilerplate generator badly

This sounds just extremely dumb to me, as in "do something manually for 2 minutes or spend 2 days automating it"

Also, DRY in 90% of the cases is a sham

DRY is usually helpful if you don't use it in situations where you have like 2 semi-different things. If they're actually the same and you have 3 or more then the level of abstraction is worth it almost always.

To me, there are two classifications of DRY - one I find harmful, the other very useful.

First one resembles mathematical extractions, essentially you never allow a single chunk of code to be written twice and you create massive amounts of global util junk. This also creates some bad tight coupling.

The other is more logical, where you only extract logic in places you want to always change together. Simple and effective.

DRY, but also pre-optimization and dependency hell are bad.

I don't get it, what's so bad about boilerplate?

Found the Java developer.

Writing code is bad!

*Writes condensed configurations and properties files in 3 different languages instead. Cloud deployment uses yet another source of configurations and properties.*

*Doesn't write documentation for configuration and properties.*

Ah, yes, that's much more readable.

Sure, though you’re arguing against an entirely different thing. Nobody said writing code is bad.

well why is it good? why not just assume the boilerplate as the default and require the user to override it if they want to do something fancy?

it's just busywork to always need to write the same stuff, and it also makes the code less readable and many people look at all that boilerplate and nope the fuck out.

This is why python is so good for getting people to realize that programming isn't magic, you just write the equivalent of one short sentence and BAM text in the terminal, no need to import the basic ability to print text which is so incredibly inane.

It's the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it's so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it's probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

It's not really that hard to implement AI as far as I can tell, even if it does produce garbage results. Any CEO that thinks otherwise is getting bamboozled.

Not that I'm defending AI, boilerplate is still boilerplate and a crappier product is a crappier product. But they'll take that trade off anyway which is why heads need to roll, lol

do it like my companies does and do both. lol