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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

A random brain dump prompted by this statement: "No DRY. It does not scale with CSS, just focus on better components"

All programming involves resolving a conflict between two different principles and a lot of the fiercest disagreements are between people that weight the importance of these two things differently:

1. Reducing repetition

2. Reducing dependencies and side effects

The language and it's tooling/ecosystem can affect the importance of these.

The project's complexity, rate of change and lifespan is also a factor that might push you one way or the other.

But anything that helps one of these harms the other.

Thoughts?

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I wouldn't say that they are always mutually exclusive. I think there is a variable ratio between advantages gained by 1. and disadvantages caused by 2.

In other words, at first, reducing repetition will net nearly no negative results - you just recognise different areas that do very similar things and write a common functionality. The most basic example would be programming languages providing standard libraries, even though everything could be done with regular operations. At this point, abstractions are even simpler to use than implementing things yourself.

Problems start to arise once you hit a certain point beyond which your abstractions become harder to use and maintain than simply writing things multiple times. This is where you should stop abstracting/modularising things away (assuming that the reason is purely overengineering, not bad engineering).

That's consistent with my experience with a very DRY Sass library. If the consumer needs flexibility, such as different themes or new context for components it quickly becomes impossible to manage dependencies and abstraction begin to leak.

CSS tooling is quite rudimentary, too, which doesn't help.

You are essentially right. But I would say anything that helps one of these harms the other.

Part of the art of good language/library/thingy design is to understand, and then defy those trade-offs. Try and have you cake and eat it too. It's not always possible, but sometimes it is.

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