On Mar 11, 2:25 pm, Sam Smoot <ssm... / gmail.com> wrote: > This topic really bothers me. ;-) The tendency to see more Ruby > (mostly Rails) code use option hashes all over the place is sloppy > (IMO). The interface is less clear. Behaviour breaks or changes > unexpectedly. It's just bad practice. > > Branching isn't DRY. So maybe there's a responsibility they all share > that could be extracted. In this case maybe that's generating X > characters of padding. That could be extracted. But making a "meta- > method" is not in itself DRY. In fact, the goal of DRYness seems to > lately be trumping longer standing lessons of loose coupling, cohesive > code, composition over inheritance, seperation of concerns, etc. All > of these should be much higher priority than DRYness. In fact, to go > to an extreme, you'll end up with much nicer code if you completely > abandon attempts at DRYness outside of your business layer and instead > focus on composition, cohesion and SoC. > > Just one ranter's opinion. ;-) > > DRY is the new new, and like every other that came before it, the most > recent probably being Design Patterns, it's being over-used and abused > to the detriment of code quality. How does this translate into an answer to the original question? Interesting analysis. T.