Code Reduction or Spartan Programming

"Hemingway was famous for a terse minimalist style of writing that dispensed with flowery adjectives and got straight to the point. In short, Hemingway wrote with simple genius.

"Perhaps his finest demonstration of short sentence prowess was when he was challenged to tell an entire story in only 6 words:

"For sale: baby shoes, never used."

Every now and then you come across code that's as good as that, and when you do it's a wonder to behold.

A lot of this stuff just boils down to Don't Repeat Yourself. If all substantial ideas in your codebase are only expressed once, then changing your mind about any idea in your system is easy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself