I’ve got a ticket to DRY

All programmers tend to agree that repeating yourself [in code] should be avoided. This is commonly known by the acronym DRY.

After looking at some demos of a search engine today a light bulb lit up in my head [not an energy effecient one I’m afraid]. The interface to the search allowed you to select from different categories and the result was dynamically updated. Nothing remarkable in that but wouldn’t it be great if we could search our code this way? And I’m not talking about the ability to find something in just your project. What if you could search the entire enterprise code based on filters for method names, return types etc right within the IDE. Every time you write a new method or class you could quickly find similar pieces of code within the enterprise. Now this may lead to some time pressured / lesser experienced developers to copy and paste more, but for me it would identify areas where it makes sense to provide libraries / services based on the actual coding needs of the developers. It would also help target problem areas across different projects. I may try and knock up a proof of concept in .NET using something like Lucene as the search engine. Not sure how this might work just yet, but it would either examine the source itself or use static analysis, something like cecil and the approach I’ve talked about before. Does anybody else think this is a good idea? What should the filters be?

Classic Mistakes

Interesting findings on classic mistakes in software can be found here.

As always use the DRY principle to avoid them!