111–120 of 375 posts
No it's not. This has always been a needlessly iconoclastic rather than sensible suggestion. At the very least it is not once you're working at the wrong kind of scale. Once you have an awkward number of customers (more than five and less than a hundred), maintaining duplicated code that should have been abstracted and modularised will only seem cheap if you don't mind that you burn through even junior employees at a…
I 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 worke…
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Code duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction. If you have a good abstraction, you should run with it. If you haven't figured out a good abstraction at 5-100 customers, God help you.
A good abstraction? As in one? I'd go so far as to say the process of discovering and refining abstractions is the most important part of software engineering. A large project has dozens of abstractions, and some of them are "wrong" at any time, as you discover over time. None are ever perfect. If you wait to stop duplicating code until you have the "right" abstraction, you are just putting off the hard part of devel…
No it's not. This has always been a needlessly iconoclastic rather than sensible suggestion. At the very least it is not once you're working at the wrong kind of scale. Once you have an awkward number of customers (more than five and less than a hundred), maintaining duplicated code that should have been abstracted and modularised will only seem cheap if you don't mind that you burn through even junior employees at a…
Code duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction. If you have a good abstraction, you should run with it. If you haven't figured out a good abstraction at 5-100 customers, God help you.
This is tautological though, it's like saying “starving is much better than eating the wrong food” (for instance: eating quick lime).
Of course you'll always find a way to do things wrong in a way that is costlier than not doing anything.
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> Maintaining the wrong abstraction, or, god help, abstractions, would be even worse. Hard disagree. When you've had to chase through a change in untold and actually unknown numbers of duplications of code in different permutations and fix them because they are all on fire simultaneously, you'd disagree too. A bad abstraction would at least have had one fire in one place.
In your mind, what's the cost of the wrong abstraction?
But any abstraction ends up with a signature and a name that can quickly be found in code.
The risk of a long-lived duplication losing its shape and being hard to find is much greater. Especially if the code is going through multiple hands.
I once had to pick up a project — a working, fully functional website. I could see, pretty clearly, the work of several people. All but one of them terrible.
The one was a diligent developer who was fully wrong in their abstraction (in fact significantly) but was consistent in how they used it.
The rest had simply worked around that code, copied and re-copied their own modified duplications and let things lose any shape. The result was error-prone stuff.
Clearly either the budget (or the client's capriciousness — a separate issue and arguably the bigger one) scared away the one guy, who I actually wanted to talk to but could not track down. He possibly had the origin story, and I wanted to know why his particular abstraction, which was at odds with the framework, was there. It was good code in the wrong shape, and it clearly used to do more, and that is interesting.
All the expedient people who had decided to avoid his code and just patch in duplicated pieces around it were the problem. There was no form to their solution at all. And that had clearly happened over some time (because you could see several different code styles)
No it's not. This has always been a needlessly iconoclastic rather than sensible suggestion. At the very least it is not once you're working at the wrong kind of scale. Once you have an awkward number of customers (more than five and less than a hundred), maintaining duplicated code that should have been abstracted and modularised will only seem cheap if you don't mind that you burn through even junior employees at a…
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I disagree. But also it's very possible to not realise you needed an abstraction until it catches fire in multiple places. And quite often it's not you that got the codebase to a hundred customers, is it? Sometimes it is a sequence of fresh-faced young developers who didn't have the authority to say "this duplication is bullshit" and were instead compelled to repeat it. I think a lot of these discussions happen in ni…
> I disagree. So... the wrong abstraction, no matter how bad, is better than code duplication?
> I would go as far as to say that any abstraction you can maintain (that is in active maintenance, I mean) is better than code duplication once you are past a de minimis threshold.
I appear to be in a solid minority thinking this. But I'm OK with it. I'm probably not going to write a blog post.
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Hardly iconoclastic, it's a very sensible suggestion. It would be iconoclastic if the common sense basic approach would be to start with abstraction. It's not, the common sense default is to write possibly duplicate behavior until you actually discover several cases to abstract away, until you bevalop a sensible idea of which functionality unites them and which doesn't carry over all of them. > Once you have an awkwa…
> Maintaining the wrong abstraction, or, god help, abstractions, would be even worse. Hard disagree. When you've had to chase through a change in untold and actually unknown numbers of duplications of code in different permutations and fix them because they are all on fire simultaneously, you'd disagree too. A bad abstraction would at least have had one fire in one place.
Abstractions are a form of coupling, and coupling can be good, if the components are truly interdependent, and have a well defined domain. The problem with most abstractions, and I’ve seen this time and time again, is that they become brittle, are over used, and the cost of maintaining them grows exponentially with the size of the code base. With the reason for the cost ballooning being the system has disparate components that look interrelated but are absolutely not. Once you give someone a hammer they tend to assume everything is a nail.
The biggest problem, IMHO, is that abstractions are often used where a pattern would be more effective, easier to maintain, and easier to iterate on. And the primary difference between a pattern and an abstraction really comes down to coupling. Patterns remain decoupled, abstractions are tightly coupled.
And to be clear, I will and do use abstractions, when and where they make sense. But only after clear patterns emerge, and it’s been proven that components are truly coupled.
I will gladly die on the hill, that abstractions are measurably worse than duplication an overwhelming amount of the time. They’re often nothing more than a form of premature optimization.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardly iconoclastic, it's a very sensible suggestion. It would be iconoclastic if the common sense basic approach would be to start with abstraction. It's not, the common sense default is to write possibly duplicate behavior until you actually discover several cases to abstract away, until you bevalop a sensible idea of which functionality unites them and which doesn't carry over all of them. > Once you have an awkwa…
At work there’s been a huge number of duplication in the start of the company and no solid abstraction. So no tests as well. We introduced tests in the current architecture but rewriting code has a huge cost to make sure there is no regression. When we talk about a saas it’s non-trivial with many customers relying on this tool daily as part of their workflow, regressions because of rewrite could be really painful for…
It all depends on the amount of duplication and the complexity of the abstraction. Like you said, no generic advice is possible that clearly separates it into "abstract here" and "duplicatehere".
In your example it sounds like we aren't talking about 2-3 places where duplicate code existed that just needed to be refactored into separate units. It sounds more like a complete disregard for abstraction to move on quickly.
If you see duplicate code and have a good understanding how to solve that then it's totally a good thing. The real problem comes in if you add abstractions without knowing wether they will hold up. And this is where the blogpost comes in. In my opinion 2 duplicates are fine, at 3 you should start thinking or implementing an abstraction if you have a good understanding of the code and usecases.