In rails shops, "dry" is _always_ overused. It was part of the red->green cycle in TDD culture, and got mentioned in every context, and as a result nearly all legacy rails apps are filled with weird abstractions introduced in a commit with a message like "dry it up". The problem is that it's phrased as a rule rather than a smell.
DRY deserves to be listed with other code smells that may indicate a missing abstraction (and there are many), but there is never a reason to blindly extract chunks of code based purely on repetition. That's not a "first step toward good programming", it's a step in the wrong direction.
DRY deserves to be listed with other code smells that may indicate a missing abstraction (and there are many), but there is never a reason to blindly extract chunks of code based purely on repetition. That's not a "first step toward good programming", it's a step in the wrong direction.