Chapter 5. The DRY SPOT Principle

 

I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.

 
 --Peter de Vries

The DRY SPOT principle is what I call the business of avoiding multiple definitions of things. DRY stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself, as eruditely espoused by those masters of the game, The Pragmatic Programmers, in their eponymous book. SPOT stands for Single Point of Truth, the equivalent principle well known under that name in the UNIX world. In respect to both these oracular sources, I refer to this principle as DRY SPOT, in no small part because, being an Englishman, I can no more resist a bad pun than one dog can resist sniffing another.

The DRY SPOT, by whatever name, is something that’s basic fare for all good software engineers. ...

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