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Comment by jaredsohn | Hacker News Reader

Instead of calling it 'The Rule of Three', call it WET (Write Everything Twice); makes it easier to remember (although I think that is one less repetition than suggested in the parent.)

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The problem isn’t the acronym, it’s the dogma that grows around it. WET will be wrong in certain circumstances too.

Our industry is full of dogma and false prophets. It’s unbelievably frustrating.

Nobody should always DRY or WET; my context is I wrote some code for a greenfield part of a project and was told to DRY multiple times. Was easy to reply 'I prefer WET here' and link to an article on WET rather than explaining the redundancy.

Interestingly, I just looked at the wikipedia page for DRY (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself) and see they also mention another acronym - AHA (avoid hasty abstractions); I might use that in the future.

In that case, you could keep the acronym the same, but just explain it as Write Everything Thrice.

The name is largely irrelevant, though WET may be more memorable when attached to DRY. The important element is the deliberate introduction or allowance of repetition with the intent (and ideally actually doing) of examining and refactoring later. Later is often not even that much later, IME. Usually the next step I take after putting in the repetition because I can see the common structure properly while it's all fresh in my head, but I couldn't see it when I initially started writing it (or saw the wrong part as the common structure, which bit me enough that I committed to the rule of three idea).

Write Everything Thrice?

just stay MOIST and you're gravy

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