Remembering the Future

The DRY principle says there must be a single authoritative representation of a piece of knowledge. It's worded that way for a reason: it says nothing about having lots of non-authoritative copies. So why isn't this duplication? Because (assuming an active code generator) these copies are not part of the code base. They are simply artifacts, in the same way that (say) object or class files are artifacts of the build process. The input to the code generator, which obviously is a part of the checked-in code, contains no duplication. The transient artifacts that are generated may.

Topics: CodeGeneration | Representation