alt Hacker NewsToo many abstractions are bad. Too many code duplication is bad.
Part of being a good engineer is finding the right balance.
I know engineers who would gladly duplicate code all over the code base to avoid creating a new abstraction.
I know engineers who create polymorphic abstractions for a single caller with a very obvious set of parameters.
So much of wisdom is in finding balance and not being dogmatic about rules.
Replies
andix • today at 6:41 PM
Duplication is often less harmful than abstraction.
Duplications can often be cleaned up over time, bad abstractions can quickly become a bottleneck, that severely slow down everyone working on the project.
I feel like the balance has shifted over the last 30 years, and is speeding up. Semi-automatic and fully automatic re-factoring has made dealing with duplicated code much faster, cheaper and safer. Changing abstraction is still high risk.