Comment by Ma8ee

I see similar arguments come up over and over at HN, and I say they stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of DRY. What we must not repeat is not lines of code, but how we do certain things in the code. That is, it’s fine to repeat syntactically identical sections of code if their semantic meaning is different. But if the semantic meaning is the same, they must never be repeated because we must never have several definitions of the same thing in the same program. This is similar to the concept of normalisations in DBs.