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Comment by nfw2 | Hacker News Reader

"The epitome of genius in my mind is finding the solution that solves the problem without introducing anything at all."

Agreed. Albert Einstein once said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." This tautology sounds a bit silly, but I think the point is that the escalation of complexity needs to be fought with intentional focus.

That said, I think abstraction can be a useful tool for fighting complexity, even if introduced before business needs demand. In other words, developing a series of independent one-off solutions could add more complexity to your system in the long run than finding the right conceptual model that unifies them proactively.

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> proactively

And here's the problem. 90% of the time pro-active abstraction (complexity) is never needed and therefore bad.

You can always do things retro-actively.

If you find yourself writing the same thing 3 times then yes, by all means abstract it away.

Good abstractions are not invented; they reveal yourself to you in due time.

> You can always do things retro-actively.

Doesn't this vary depending on who consumes your code and how easily they can adapt to change?

Good abstractions don't just exist to reduce code reuse; they help people reason about software. They turn logical operations into higher order concepts that are easy to think about. If this weren't true we would write all our programs as single, very long functions.

The right abstractions will reduce complexity not add to it. Consider the following information architecture:

Cats are warm-blooded animals that produce milk and give live birth. Dogs are warm-blooded animals that produce milk and give live birth. Humans are warm-blooded animals that produce milk and give live birth.

Mammals are warm-blooded animals that produce milk and give live birth. Cats are mammals. Dogs are mammals. Humans are mammals.

I would argue the latter is less complex even though it contains an abstraction.

Also, you can't always fix things retroactively. As an IC, you don't control what efforts are funded. Not all organizations invest significant resources in cleaning up tech debt, even it helps long-term productivity.

This works until the analogue of monotremes shows up to ruin your supposedly flawless categorisation.

YAGNI

I didn't say the categorization was flawless; I said it reduced the complexity of the information. Categories can be useful without being flawless.

It is not a “can be”, it’s a “must be”. Models or an abstraction of complexity are necessarily both reductionist and useful.

> The right abstractions will reduce complexity not add to it.

Platypus joined the chat.

Monotremes are mammals that lay eggs. Platypi are monotremes.

(If you like, you can change the definition of “mammal” to say “give birth to live young, except for monotremes”. That's exhaustive.)

I think the point of the thread is that you're probably not going to need a platypus or a human or even a dog. If the requirements are that you support a cat only, then you just need a Cat class and no big abstraction taxonomy.

>Good abstractions are not invented; they reveal yourself to you in due time.

Love that quote, that’s usually how it goes for me.

This sounds like Einstein the mythical quote-originator, rather than the human scientist. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/

All the same it's a good aphorism.