Despite the backlash in the comments, I have to say I agree with the article. I realized eventually that it's our job to produce solutions, and not write code. Engineering (at least for software) is about making a computer do something novel, or if not that then making easy to adapt. Creating code that is nice and elegant, DRY, is about engineering code, but not engineering a solution. If it helps make things easier then sure, but despite the simplicity of the examples I think they demonstrate what everyone has seen -- this one nice to have function or whatever turning really ugly from trying to handle all of the edge cases. At that point it becomes nice to not have, but it's too late.

Also, I liked the comment from ihateolives somewhere in the thread a lot.