In some programming languages there is an essential, powerful tension between two common pieces of advice: Don’t Repeat Yourself and Meaningful Names over Code Comments. Both are really good pieces of advice.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) means that if you can find an abstraction that allows you to avoid repetition in your code, you can remove the need to debug multiple code blocks if you find an error, and you can test the abstraction more reliably and more efficiently. The opposite of DRY is, of course, WET, “Written-out Every Time.”

“Meaningful Names over Code Comments” means that if you have strong, descriptive names for classes, functions, and variables, then code comments are often not merely unnecessary but possibly harmful as they drift out-of-date with the actual content of the code.

At my ${DAY_JOB}, I ran into this conflict in a big way. This example is in Python, but it applies to any language with metalanguage capabilities, which includes Ruby, Lisp, Rust, and even C++.