I’ve noticed similar trends. After a while, I started to realise that a lot of the critics don’t really understand the principle they’re criticising.

For example, take DRY. The important principle was never really about repeating code. It was about repeating ideas. For any given concept in your system, ideally there should be a single source of truth, and therefore a single place you need to understand or change if you’re working with that concept. It’s true that this means copying and pasting non-trivial amounts of code instead of creating a meaningful abstraction is often a bad idea. But it is also a warning that any time you do repeat an idea, you now have an ongoing liability because you need to keep those different representations in sync. That could refer to database migrations that define your schema and separate ORM class definitions, or an API you define in your back-end code and a client for that API you define in your front-end code, or a retained mode UI where you have a current value in some form field that corresponds to a specific value in your internal application state, or some invariant in your data model that can be represented in both types and unit tests.

People who object to combining duplicate or near-duplicate code that represents different ideas but happens to have a similar implementation at the time, on the basis that it’s a maintenance hazard for later on, aren’t wrong. They’re just objecting to a straw man that was never really the point of DRY in the first place, but has been treated as if it were due to some kind of cargo cult/gaslighting effect.

The question I have now is where and when in our industry do we expect new developers to learn these principles so they do understand them properly? Some people have a formal background in CS or the like, but not everyone does, and in any case it’s not necessarily the role of an academic CS course to teach a lot of practical software development skills. I had a discussion the other day about how when I was starting out, the senior developers would give real, substantial training to the juniors to help us learn and understand these principles, but with the job-hopping culture today and the resulting general aversion to hiring juniors as a long-term investment, that just doesn’t seem to happen much any more. There are formal courses that cost a lot by personal standards but almost nothing by business standards, but there must be a tiny proportion of new developers who actually get sent on them by their employers. There are a few books worth reading, but what 20-something in 2024 wants to deal with presentation as antiquated as ink on sliced bits of tree? I suspect a lot of what today’s up and coming developers learn about these ideas comes from sources like blogs and YouTube videos, where again there is some great material out there, but as ever the problem is finding it among all the poorly understood and dubiously presented dross.

And then we wonder why tools come along that seem like magic, producing a dozen lines of code in a heartbeat that seem to mostly work, and young developers think they’re great even while having little idea of all the deeper things that may be wrong with that code. It’s not really surprising, and I’m not sure it’s really anyone’s fault, but it’s definitely a problem and I wish I knew what we should do about it.