We get enthralled by the maelstrom of complexity and the mental puzzle of engineering elegant solutions: Another layer of abstraction! DRY it up! Separate the concerns! Composition over inheritance! This too is understandable, but in the process, we often lose sight of the business problems being solved and forget that managing complexity is the second most important responsibility of software developers.

You appear in the story about here, and your life takes a dramatic turn for the worse.

Loop until code becomes incomprehensible. What was once a universal abstraction now behaves differently for different cases. Programmer B feels honor-bound to retain the existing abstraction, but since isn’t exactly the same for every case, they alter the code to take a parameter, and then add logic to conditionally do the right thing based on the value of that parameter.

Programmer B gets tasked to implement this requirement.

Programmer A trots happily away.Ī new requirement appears for which the current abstraction is almost perfect.

Programmer A replaces the duplication with the new abstraction.Īh, the code is perfect.

It could be a new method, or perhaps even a new class.

Programmer A extracts duplication and gives it a name.

“prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction”

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