alt Hacker NewsI once had to work with a system that was refactored and abstracted away heavily to use Redux. It didn't work then, the implementation had way too many abstractions, doing any change meant you had to touch dozens of files. It was insanity. Left me with a bitter taste regarding the redux pattern for ever (probably not the pattern's fault).
Over-abstraction is as much of a problem as under-abstraction. If the abstraction isn’t improving your ability to produce good code, it’s a bad abstraction. I’ve worked with a lot of abstraction patterns in a lot of languages over the 30 years of my career. Any of them can be good or bad. Unthinkingly applying them is always a problem.
Unsurprisingly, that goes for just about any idea in software development. I worked in one code base that heard small functions are best, so every function was less than three lines long. You don’t gain anything by replacing `lst.get(0)` with `get_first_item_in_list(lst)` (in fact, understanding becomes much more difficult), but breaking down functions into the smallest units that make sense independently within the business domain can be very helpful, both for understanding and testing.