This matches my experience as well.
Someone here commented once that abstractions should be emergent, not speculative, and I loved that line so much I use it with my team all the time now when I see the craziness starting.
This matches my experience as well.
Someone here commented once that abstractions should be emergent, not speculative, and I loved that line so much I use it with my team all the time now when I see the craziness starting.
It's advice I like, as I'm prone to falling into design paralysis while trying to think of the One True Abstract Entity.
I more think the point is that the abstractions now obvious to you emerged at some earlier point that you now recognize, and application makes sense. Speculative implies predicting, and if you've been around long enough in the same domain, it's likely you aren't guessing.
It's probably something that applies more to younger devs than older, but not exclusively of course.
Dang, I love that line, too. It is 100% correct, and the opposite of what OOP teaches.
I think every dev lives in fear of the situation where abstraction hasn't been done when it really should have. Maybe some junior dev came in after you and shoehorned in a bunch of features to your "simple" solution. Now you have to live with that but, guess what, there's no time to refactor it, in fact the business just wants even more features.
As usual these rules work best if everyone on the team understands them in the same way. If you work with people who can only see what is right in front of them (ie. the current feature), then it'll never work. You can always fit "one more feature" into the perfect codebase without thinking about the abstractions.
Usually because intent is far clearer in the former case.