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wrong abstractions are worse than duplication

This needs to be given a catchy phrasing and spread all across developer communities!

WTD == Worse Than Duplication?

WAAW == Wrong Abstractions Are Worse?

It's a great principle and I reference it frequently, but as a catchy buzzphrase it has the potential to do as much harm as good: it's easy to abuse as an excuse for copy paste programming.

Duplication is still bad, and correct abstractions are still good.

See also "premature optimization is the root of all evil", which I occasionally see stretched to include any kind of thinking about the performance characteristics of your code, even down to basic design decisions like data structures or algorithms.

Great point. I've found that most codebases have some abstractions that work very well and others that work less well, and simply having awareness of this can help make the code far more readable.

For instance, one might say: "The way x is implemented works, but it's not quite the right abstraction, here's why". That is way more informative than saying it's simply the wrong abstraction or considering it good enough and ignoring its deficiencies.

Premature abstraction is the root of all evil.

Premature abstraction is pure mathematics

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