DRY up your WET clothes

As a novice web developer, I always tend to code stuff up, see if it works, and proceed when it does. Then back to step one. I think most developers went through just that at one point or another. Problem with this whole “going back to step one” phase is that I tend to code stuff up, again, from step one. What is good about this practice is that it is really easy for a newbie to trace back his steps when he sees numbers and jumbled symbols instead of words. With the simple stuff that most newbie developers do, it won’t be much of a burden to the server anyway if he continues this WET, write-everything-twice, (or more, for that matter) Principle. Packing as much experience as I do have now (definitely not that much), it is very much clear that this is a bad practice. Actually, “bad” is an understatement. Codes come in bits and bytes. Loading them requires bandwidth. Everything else is simple math: 1 byte is easier and faster to load than 2 bytes.

And along comes Django.

Django has this particular tenet concerning code repetition: the DRY, don’t-repeat-yourself, principle. Why is it that important? It’s basically this: if you can kill two birds with one stone, why bring two stones in the first place? Efficiency is key. And working with Django over the past month taught me just that: to always bring a single stone.

If it does the same thing, it only needs to exist once in the system. If you ever feel the need to edit a specific entry, you only edit one entry. If you need to delete a specific entry, a single stone will suffice.

I once read somewhere that the Y2K bug was caused by the violation of this fundamental rule.

WET coding may be a hard habit to break but the advantages of DRY coding simply outweighs the former. And if DRY isn’t a cool enough acronym for you, try this: DIE (Duplication is Evil)

Ciao.