Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

202204031033 Abstractions and future-coding are actively harmful

Abstractions and future coding are the single greatest cause of convoluted, complex, unintelligible, inflexible, and unusable code.

“Saving typing” is the most inane excuse for any piece of code to exist. It’s completely divorced from any measure of why that code is good or bad.

Future coding is gambling and dictated by random chance.1

Interestingly enough, I don’t think interfaces fall in this category. I believe putting connections behind interfaces and coding to those is almost an ideal. There’s something different about this than the abstractions I’m talking about above. Coding to an interface says, I’m going to maintain a healthy separation here and have seams to help me make future changes.

  1. Sylvan, S. (2013, August 16). The Perils of Future-Coding [Blog]. A Random Walk Through Geek-Space. https://www.sebastiansylvan.com/post/the-perils-of-future-coding/ ↩