As I began to read Richard Gabriel’s Repetition, Generativity, and Patterns during compiles today, I first thought that he wrote about this. After having read it all, though, I realized that it was related, but not quite the same thing.

Choice quotes:

Recurrence works because actions, characteristics, and relations that are noticeable repeat. Every act – every thing – contains not only the noticed repeated parts but also attendant, variable portions. The recurrent parts stand out because our minds (our brains?) are constructed that way.

[…]

What repeats is important and reveals commonality. What isn’t repeated is variable and can be highlighted or hidden. Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free. Abstraction reveals and revels in what is common, the repetition, and what is abstract is defined by the repeated. The remainder, in science, basks behind the veil of ignorance, and the remainder, in computing, is filled in as missing. Abstractions is what we know as long as what is repeated has the magic of enchantment and song of incantation.

[…]

The work of the Hillside group is to remind us that people in teams and groups write software, and that in the absence of rituals and repetitions, recurrences, every step of the way for the individual is invention and creation. Software engineering is not yet engineering and won’t be, cannot be, for decades if not centuries, because we cannot yet recognize the important, repeatable parts. When we do we will have patterns – recurrences, predictability.

Go on and read it in full. Like most of his writing, it’s very good.