WRT the code zealot listing, there is a problem with non-idiomatic code.
For example most modern languages have list comprehension and some kind of built in map-reduce on a collection built in for free, nicely debugged, etc. Once in awhile you'll run into noob code where someone writes their own long elaborate and buggy routine full of if/then and goto to slowly iterate a pointer thru an array, sometimes skipping the first or last element of the array, etc. But if all an immature dev knows is "if then and goto" and not that fancy list comprehension stuff, you can get some crazy looking code that can be optimized, sometimes, down to one idiomatic line of code.
There are of course other examples of non-idiomatic code. Now is DRY don't repeat yourself idiomatic or a best practice or both or ?
I have seen a Java code where a "senior developer" (a guy hired a few months before me, therefore considered expert by the management) reinvented an associative array. Two lists (one for the keys, one for the values), with methods to add an item and get an item. Not even encapsulated as a new type, but a separate pair of lists and pair of methods for each associative array... there were dozens of instances in the code.
On the positive side, fixing bugs in his code was often easy. First I refactored hundreds of lines of code into ten lines, then I added the missing "if".
For example most modern languages have list comprehension and some kind of built in map-reduce on a collection built in for free, nicely debugged, etc. Once in awhile you'll run into noob code where someone writes their own long elaborate and buggy routine full of if/then and goto to slowly iterate a pointer thru an array, sometimes skipping the first or last element of the array, etc. But if all an immature dev knows is "if then and goto" and not that fancy list comprehension stuff, you can get some crazy looking code that can be optimized, sometimes, down to one idiomatic line of code.
There are of course other examples of non-idiomatic code. Now is DRY don't repeat yourself idiomatic or a best practice or both or ?