I agree with you. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. However what the practical application of DRY ends up being for me is that I have a "bag of tricks" I carry with me as well as my own "library o' repetitious programming tasks" that I look into first. Much of the time I can save a lot of time by reusing old code. I may have a bit of code that is too specific for the original purpose and get tired of the technical debt it causes, and re-write it. So in that case I am repeating myself, but its with the benefit of experience. More of a refactor than repeat.