Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)
sandimetz.com
sandimetz.com
But with that in mind, I mostly agree with the article: if it's not a violation of "single source of truth", then abstractions are just a convenience. If it starts being inconvenient, then it's not doing its job and there's no reason to use it. It's a serious code smell if a function needs several flags for custom behavior; that means it's probably the wrong abstraction or violating the single responsibility principle. If there is a legit need for lots of customization, an often-good way to handle is to take a function/functor as an argument for the customization. E.g., rather than `solve(f:double -> double, max_iters = 99, x_abs_tol = 1e-15, x_rel_tol = 1e-15, ...)` you can do `solve(f:double -> double, stopping_criteria: StoppingCriteriaClass)`
Fundamentally, the article addresses cases where it's not clear yet how many sources of truth there will be. Are the two spots in the code using the same algorithm, or slightly different versions? More importantly, will they change for the same sorts of reasons?
The title adage (correctly, imo) argues that making two different things the same will cause you more pain than making two same things different via duplication. In the latter thing case, the "damage" is just having to make the same changes twice, or doing a refactor to introduce the abstraction. In the former case, you have to keep adding to your abstraction, or undo it. Most crucially, it breaks "locality", which is the only property you really care about when making changes. I just want to make this change and not worry about side effects to unrelated parts of the system.
Accidental divergence is the problem, not intentional.
But, again, the point is that you don't know yet whether you have a single source of truth or not. It's a question of the relative badness of duplication vs premature abstraction in cases where the code may diverge or converge in the future. There is no generic answer. But as a heuristic, based on my personal experience, I have always found premature abstractions to be more painful to work with. Even more so when someone else has authored them.
So many times I've had to untangle these types of abstractions when business asks for changes to case X but not Case Y. OR worse, business asks for changes to case X, but it also affects Case Y due to abstractions. Business see X/Y as different things so did not even think to mention that the new suggested behavior is to only affect case X, but to coders they're the same.
If you only spot the bug in path A and not path B, why fix the bug for B?
… sometimes duplicate things unnecessarily.
And instead it gets replaced with the actual root of all evil, complexity.
Many problems have tons of inherent complexity already.
TL;DR: Vibes
Fun fact: Win32 checkboxes are buttons with a bitflag that says they are actually checkboxes.
Here we're loading the customer record and updating their discount %
Here we're loading the broker record and updating their commision %
They will have 99% identical code.
It's possible but exceedingly unlikely we have found 2 things that should be a load_record_and_update_percent(file,id,field,val)
Tomorrow the business logic behind one of those will no longer be a simple % and now you have a real mess.
It can, that's all about how aggressively you factor and structure your code, eg. combinators make it easy to reuse code in different application patterns without rewriting.
Even in that case the refactor can introduce mental overhead when having too many different variable / properties names
Very similar with patterns. I've often read people protesting that juniors overuse design patterns, yet I've seldom seen a junior (mis)use anything more complex than a singleton, and when they use any pattern, it's usually forced upon them by an opinionated Java framework.
Shape::Polygon::ConvexPolygon::FourSidedConvexPolygon::Square::BlueSquare...
"Intro to OOP" lectures/articles made a deep impression on some people in not quite the right way :)
Mind you, I mean enterprise and line of business software, not hobbyists. I also mean of their own volition, not the kind of nonsense that Java frameworks often forced on them (all the patterns under the rainbow, factory abstract method factory of abstract methods).
Regarding OOP itself, I also remember when "favor composition over inheritance" became a thing. Was this reversed too?
I think this is generally still the advice, when working in OOP contexts.
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[1] https://archive.is/QVPj (excuse the archive link, Ted Neward's blog seems now lost to linkrot).
> I love an ORM.
> Are ORMs still a thing?
> favor composition over inheritance
I've seen it occasionally. There was one junior whose code I saw littered with DTO that're an exact copy of the business object and DAOs where every method is just a wrapper for a Hibernate method. But yeah it's rare.
(Alas! Sometimes you pick up bad habits from experienced people, and being a junior, you don't know better)
„How Software Groups Rot: Legacy of the Expert Beginner”.
https://daedtech.com/how-software-groups-rot-legacy-of-the-e...
I have recently fallen into a job at a small company that really seems to have this culture. Thankfully, I'm only going to be here for a year and a half or so (fixed term job for working holiday visa), but I'm trying to be really aware of how its impacting my career development.
There is no automated testing, no meetings, seemingly no code review process, no standardization of schemas for files that are passed between different applications, all jobs are run on on prem desktop workstations.
This is why we have to have programs that duplicate code by doing anything like adding two numbers together or complex logic that is easy to create bugs when someone wrote it 40 years ago better. Because code reuse is mostly done on a very small scale.
Given thats the case when you start on a new React project as an example you are not reusing application code you are duplicating the react framework so you can duplicate every other web app in every sense except maybe the visual.
There is no such thing as full reuse and until we get to a universal network invocable function tree that can be extended only when its truly unique we never will. Maybe AI will do this. People cannot.
At the end of the day code duplication needs to exist to optimize for local correctness (or incorrectness) and speed and abstractions goal is not to provide pure reuse. Its to provide a place to "put your logic" that may be similar and has access to typical state that some kind of widget might typically need.
What works well is to generate one from the other and check the generated one into source control, and then verify that the checked in generated copy stays up to date using a CI job. But that’s very similar to the “two sources of truth, verified sync” approach
That's a very nice rule of thumb. I've often overabstracted when two pieces of code look similar at one point in time and then they diverge.
The problem is not knowing which of the hundreds or thousands of potential truth sources is worth abstracting. The only real way of finding out is not abstracting them and seeing how it works out.
If the problems in SWE boiled down to solve(f -> MagicallyNoProblemAnymore) we wouldn’t have this discussion.
This is the key, if they are very similar but used by different consumers the chance that they will diverge in the future is very high. And once they do they will break the abstraction.
Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v
Theoretically and conceptually I agree. But in practice there are a lot of programming languages aren’t as expressive. People prefer codebases with duplications rather than visitor patterns everywhere. In essence, visitor pattern is a tool to solve multi-dimensional abstraction problems, just like type classes in Haskell or CLOS in Common Lisp. But it’s so verbose and non-straightforward so more often than not it’s not worth it even conceptually it’s a legit case for “single source of truth”.
Visitor pattern makes the row addition case possible for OOP languages, that's it.
But then I came across more cases: sprites with no directionality (an explosion), and corpse sprites (which were only 4 directions, 2 mirrors, and most except the first four were shared by both orcs and humans).
I agonized for a little bit on what the hell the common abstraction is for all this. In the end, I factored out some of the loading code, and made a UnitLoader, CorpseLoader, EffectLoader and moved on. Now, there's probably a better abstraction in there because all 3 loaders have to reason about the same things a little bit. But I will discover that abstraction later on and it's easier to just de-duplicate the code then, rather than try to identify the abstraction now and make some complicated EverythingLoader that handles all those cases.
Besides, sometimes your duplication creates "bugs" which may turn out to be fun features that players enjoy.
I think the natural instinct with programming is to try and simplify the code by means of generalization. But we often over-simplify, and reality is messy. Or as TFA mentions, time passes and new requirements arise, so it turns out that we have simplified prematurely!
Sounds like this should be an aphorism. Premature abstraction is the root of much suck!
Personally I prefer what you’re doing over trying to come up with a non-obvious abstraction or trying to make an imperfect abstraction fit. Waiting til the abstraction is totally obvious and the need is crystal clear is a good thing.
The flipside (antidote?) of DRY is WET - write everything twice/thrice. More important, IMO, is to abstract only over things I have an actual, demonstrated use case for, usually demonstrated first via duplication, and not speculate about possible future uses I might want. Code written for future use cases we don’t have is so often the code that gets in the way of abstracting the things we do have, and it cracks me up when that happens.
I discovered this after a few early years of my career being a bit of a “best practices” zealot. The thing I say often at work is, “let’s get this shipped to prod so we can start learning all the things we don’t yet know about it.”
So code duplication because of abstraction issues is rare. Code duplication because of siloed developers is so much more common.
Basically since moving to a functional approach in typescript I find I do not fight abstractions as I used to when I used classes and inheritance.
At least that's my interpretation
using projection you can "call a function in two parts"
add: {x+y}
add4: add[4] / gives {4+x} by fixing 4 as first argument to {x+y}
add4[2] / gives 6
But I'm probably overthinking it.
> but since moving pretty much to a purely functional approach
Mike's talk argues that code solutions need not be modelled on the real world, and that different data creates different problems, which need different solutions. I can't do the talk justice, but it's had a big impact on me.
Brian's talk is about abstraction generally, and how it's difficult to find the "right" abstraction.
I've always found it odd when even fairly smart engineers sometimes prioritize real-world metaphors over the actual needs of the codebase. Years ago when I was only a few years out of school, I was implementing a connection pool in Rust, and the most reasonable way to implement it was to have the connection hold a weak reference to the pool so that it could get checked back in automatically when dropped. My manager (an extremely experienced engineer) didn't like this idea because "a library holds library books, not the other way around". I didn't feel like this was a compelling reason to design things differently, but he refused to engage with the issue in any way other than through the lens of that metaphor. Eventually the impasse was solved by one of the other managers in my department suggested that while library books don't contain libraries, they do have the name of the library stamped in the back as a reference to where they should be returned, and I guess my manager found this to be a reasonable extension of the analogy. If I were more experienced, maybe I would have recognized that I could find a way to engage with the analogy like the other manager did without ceding the point, but even today I still feel that it was completely bizarre to insist on that as the canonical way to frame things rather than just considering the ramifications of the abstraction in the code and the experience of using the library based on it.
I mention this a lot, but in researching Data-Oriented Design (what Mike was talking about), I came across Richard Fabian's DoD book [1] which talks a lot about database normalization and the like. I found that odd, because the low-level high-performance game code he was talking about certainly wasn't going to marshal data into a DB to run SQL queries on it.
It turns out the relational model has a lot of advantages though. Programmers use trees all the time, in OO, in structs containing structs, in objects pointing to other objects. It's easy to forget that trees are just a special case of graphs (ie. networks), and that there are many ways to represent networks that don't rely on encoding a tree structure directly.
So, I've been doing what Richard Fabian suggested and I lay out my data (on paper) into tables, then attempt to normalize it and see the connections. I really like this way of designing things.
My big issue is that doing DB-like operations is hellish in most programming languages, and if you really want to try and marshal your data into a real DB (say, SQLite or DuckDB via a library), then you have a big messy translation layer where you're trying to match things to SQL types and you have giant SQL strings everywhere.
I see C# has LINQ, which is a query languages embedded in the language. I wonder if that approach is best, and why hasn't it been adopted more broadly? It seems like there's a lot for programming language designers to explore in this dimension, though I wonder if it even matters now with the superintelligence tidal wave.
> My big issue is that doing DB-like operations is hellish in most programming languages, and if you really want to try and marshal your data into a real DB (say, SQLite or DuckDB via a library), then you have a big messy translation layer where you're trying to match things to SQL types and you have giant SQL strings everywhere.
It's a reasonable take that changing the entire way that the database modeled everything under the hood is an overkill solution to the specific problem you mention compared to something like LINQ that can work on top of existing databases, but I can't help but wonder if there's a bit of inertia in how willing people are to challenge their usual ways of thinking about how data modeling might be possible to improve because a lot of people don't get exposed very much to anything other than the raw, string-like handling that you mention (which is annoying but at least SQL injections are a well-known thing nowadays and tend to be possible to avoid) or a full-blown ORM (which quite often ends up either being wildly inefficient or needing to drop back down into the raw SQL in some places to avoid the performance bottlenecks, which kinda defeats the entire point). A startup I worked at a few years ago actually had what I thought was a pretty clever solution to this problem, with their product generating OpenAPI/GraphQL APIs for a given database by inspecting the schema (with optional parameters to get back EXPLAIN data in the responses to verify that the query was what you wanted, and the ability to define custom routes with raw queries that were checked into shared version control with the schema migrations if you weren't happy with the query it generated as a way to properly separate concerns as an improvement over the traditional ORM workflow), but despite the idea seeming quite enticing to me from a technical standpoint, I guess it didn't show enough traction to be able to survive.
I prefer having that translation layer especially when it's domain oriented. All the sql strings are collected in one isolated module, and the only exported symbols is a set of functions.
From Domain-Driven Design, what I learned is to be comfortable having different representation of the same data in different layers/subdomains. Something may be a fat object from the API, but I prefer having a collection of functions that each use a different part and have a caching layer to not actually do the expensive network call. That network call and the caching layer will be encapsulated in one module and the collection of functions will be the only thing visible.
Data-Oriented Programming: Reduce software complexity
by Yehonathan Sharvit
https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming
and from SICP:
2.4.3 Data-Directed Programming and Additivity
https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e4.xhtml#g_t2_00...
In searching those threads, I came across a post from the author of the DOP book describing the difference between DOD, DOP, and DDP (a different DDP! Data Driven Programing; a fourth thing!) [2], and I see he also made the "naming things" joke in the first paragraph, so I guess my humour isn't that unique!
There's been quite a bit of discussion about DOD and some about DOP (and much conflation between the two) on HN, it can be interesting to read [3].
1. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
2. https://blog.klipse.tech/visualization/2021/02/16/data-relat...
Overengineering, abstractions and premature optimisation are the 3 worst plagues of engineering.
At the same time I’m happy they exist because it means we’ll always have a job.
As a senior I will tell you to dedup whether I can to avoid this shit.
HTTPS_SCHEME = 'https'
DOMAIN = 'www.example.com'
url = HTTPS_SCHEME + '://' + DOMAIN
Do not put regex at the top of the file either! Put it where you use it. Languages are smart, they’ll probably be able to tell that it’s constant anyway.
Also for tiny functions just use a lambda. Please don’t make a one line function a million miles away that you use once or twice.
If you pull it out into a constant, you're back to opening up projects one-by-one to 'find usages'
Luckily there are often solutions that just come down to which arbitrary labels that you assign. e.g. compare these two blocks
do_thing = do_thing_one_way if condition else do_thing_other_way
process(data, do_thing=do_thing)
thing_processor = do_thing_one_way if condition else do_thing_other_way
process(data, thing_processor=thing_processor)
Anyway, maybe there are other reasons too, so see Chesterton’s Fence. In any case, it’s never a good idea to assume cargo culting. Someone could easily say the same thing about using inline literals. If it looks weird, ask around and maybe you’ll find out there are good reasons, or maybe you’ll find out nobody cared and that people will like it if you refactor and embed the constants.
Over time, everyone develops their own intuition and opinions on what sorts of change and refactors are likely, and which sorts will never come. It's not perfect - it's part of the art of software, not the science. I'm not going to claim I've never written an interface that had a useless cut-point - I definitely have written many.
In my opinion, it's better to err on the side of simplicity, understandability, and closeness than to prematurely factor out those constants.
It's a judgement call - every situation and every practitioner will have a different response. In this case, knowing this product, and as the code reviewer for this patch made by a newer engineer (senior but new to the team), I was very confident that we would never need to change the scheme, and that the extra line and extra cognitive load of groking `HTTPS_SCHEME + "://"` over just `"https://"` or `BASE_URL + blah` was not worth it.
I suggested that the engineer either rewrite it with an inline constant, or refactor the whole base URL out without separating the scheme.
For $19.95, you can replace your single single point of failure with multiple single points of failure!
So it just happens, right? There is no remedy to this? You know the answer :)
BTW I'm all for monolith.
Being selfish is the core principle of microservice architecture.
Part of being a good engineer is finding the right balance.
I know engineers who would gladly duplicate code all over the code base to avoid creating a new abstraction.
I know engineers who create polymorphic abstractions for a single caller with a very obvious set of parameters.
So much of wisdom is in finding balance and not being dogmatic about rules.
Automated re-factoring means you can refactor duplicated code only as long as it is exactly duplicate.
Whereas the whole problem is that when somebody changes 3 out of 10 of the duplicate cases in a simple way that they are no longer exactly duplicate, and then somebody fixes a bug in one of the other 7/10 cases, they can update the bug across the 7 "duplicate" cases but they'll miss the 3 that aren't.
The problem with duplicate code is always when some of the instances get changed/fixed but not all of them. And that when somebody edits one instance, they often aren't even aware of all the other instances.
Abstractions are low-risk, because you know where the code is. If it's the wrong abstraction, you can fix that and know what you're fixing. Whereas with duplicated-yet-modified code, you've now lost the connections between them.
> Automated re-factoring means you can refactor duplicated code only as long as it is exactly duplicate.
Duplications can often be cleaned up over time, bad abstractions can quickly become a bottleneck, that severely slow down everyone working on the project.
it wasn't received well and senior developer told me that 'good developers know exactly what patterns to use all the time before writing any piece of code and that he will clean up my mess'
long story short his refactoring caused what was otherwise a stable system into a complete mess and it reminded me of Nassim Taleb's book
Yeah that totally happened
I've learned to tolerate a small amount of duplicate code for this reason. If the duplication remains small, it's not that harmful, and if it starts to grow, one has a better shot at finding a good abstraction for it. Bad abstraction is premature abstraction.
One thing I'm not sure this thread has mentioned yet is how LLMs alter the cost-benefit curve of this. They are much better at managing duplication than humans are, and much better at noticing inconsistencies - the sort of small bugs which duplication traditionally leads to. I don't know if this is enough to count as a different kind of good abstraction; I doubt it. It reminds me of a petroleum economist I once knew who had 200 duplicate spreadsheets analyzing different projects and who hired a junior analyst to keep them all consistent. An LLM would be like the junior analyst.
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 pace.
And in the LLM era the wrong kind of scale appears in different ways; code generated and duplicated without proper abstraction and then maintained by an LLM that cannot be trusted to do the same modification each time it encounters a pattern or to have enough of an overview to slowly rescue duplicated code through good abstractions.
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.
Everyone always thinks duplication is fine when you can bill the modifications by the hour. But they never think to understand that the reason they've had so many employees is that they've turned their change process into firefighting all the different versions of the same code and all these young developers burn out from the sheer anxiety of not knowing where all the little fires are.
I once had to rescue a site that had become a victim of its own popularity, that was written by subcontractors who clearly believed that duplication is better than the wrong abstraction.
Until one day, along came a change — MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 — and a significant duplicated query no longer worked due to its new, proper strictness.
The problem was compounded; not only was the broken pattern in hundreds of places where it had sat, stable and predictable, but the pattern was broken because it, itself, was avoidance of another abstraction that would solve it.
They quit: they said they couldn't and wouldn't fix it. It had always worked how they had done it, and it would have to stay on MySQL 4 (which the hosting provider refused to accommodate).
I don't think it helped that they were severely misguided in their understanding of SQL, but the code had become beholden to duplication and then crippled by a new problem in the duplicated pattern.
I had to first find all the contexts in which that pattern appeared (which required me to spend half a day on a bespoke script) and then work out a new pattern and as few variations of it as possible to fix the duplicated code in each place, because there was no proper budget to rewrite the whole thing. And then I sat at my desk, for days, working through each one, figuring out how to change it to fit the slightly different expression of the pattern.
Even a total bullshit abstraction would have saved that client both time and money. And this is only one of dozens of times I've seen small firms simply duplicate and change code that would later become unmaintainable because of a straw breaking a camel's back.
I would be curious if the previous coders you're talking about actually cited duplication as a good thing. You seem to be implying they are. But almost every instance I've seen of massive code duplication was just from bad programmers shooting from the hip, not from some ideological stance.
Right. But this is a hypothetical, in-a-vacuum situation.
In the real world, your two, three duplicates are in production.
"We really should now de-duplicate this"
"There is not the time or budget, just copy it again; we'll replace all this one day".
If you haven't figured out a good abstraction at 5-100 customers, God help you.
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 nice little blog-post vacuums of progressive thinking, where people can go "mmm, object oriented coding obscures intent and clarity, mmm", blog posts with "an X is a Y", "the unreasonable effectiveness of foobar" etc.
In the real world, every duplication that works sticks for good; there is rarely budget to electively replace code that isn't broken. Until one day it doesn't work. And then… how many times is it actually duplicated? How many of the duplicates diverged? How many of these do we no longer need?
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.
Half of your abstractions are wrong. The hard part is knowing which half.
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.
This blend of opinion is very naive. Every single project is a business requirement away from having the wrong abstraction in place.
Pretty much everyone arguing for duplication has argued what you are saying, which is wait to see a few instances of it before committing to an abstraction. No one is saying duplicate everything 100 times. So I don't think this discussion was ever iconoclastic.
In the real world, duplication happens in an emergent way, there isn't the time each time to judge whether it's really time to just quietly abstract that code, you may not get the permission, budget or window to do it, and if you don't stop the rot really early you are locked into the pattern.
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 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 pace
Maintaining the wrong abstraction, or, god help, abstractions, would be even worse.
Having a lot of if/else in your code is definitely a cost. My weakness isn’t so much the libraries and APIs, but the actual binary - once I have a service that does A very well, and I run into needing A’ I mostly just add in a config line “op_mode = A|A’” and have the else/if chains in the server driving code. Moreso for CLIs that I use myself than production services, but I have added tunables for consistency and replication to datastores to allow new use cases and expand my footprint in the data center.
Write everything twice quickly becomes write everything 4 times once a new change appears, just as quickly as it becomes write everything 8 times, and so on.
I'm afraid there's no sensible soundbite developers can follow blindly.
That's a good problem to have. Getting to 4 or 8 or 12, and then pruning it to 1 or maybe 2 or 3 clearly different cases, is better than shoehorning multiple cases into the wrong abstraction, having everything that speaks with them coupled to that and dancing around their assumptions, and then having to untangle that.
Duplicated code is by definition LESS coupled.
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.
Wouldn't most large codebases with poor abstractions just have engineers engineer around them with their own solutions? In a large enough codebase you'd have both the bad abstractions and all the not-quite-duplicate implementations ignoring the bad abstraction?
I'm using bad here loosely, it could be buggy, incorrect, incomplete, insufficient and more; while being owned by someone or some team that's a challenge to work with for various reasons (overloaded, under-resourced, overbearing, etc., etc.).
Obviously, yes. But it is my experience that this happens more slowly and that API invocations that break when the abstraction is changed are much easier to identify than broader duplicated patterns of code that span many lines and subtly diverge.
And even then those divergences are better because each wrapper around the abstraction is documenting the problem with it. But the abstraction can generally be replaced by one with the same API surface.
(Even if you take into account the fact that any API behaviour ultimately gets relied upon even if undocumented. Which is true.)
To be fair my experience is that of a freelancer and contractor who arrives trying to fix things that have been through many such hands. And I think if these developers had it drummed into their head that any attempt at abstraction would be better than copy and paste, these situations would be more knowable.
When that happens there's a major engineering leadership failure currently in progress, even if engineering leadership isn't aware of it.
EDIT: LLM or not, this is still true. If you have LLMs pumping out tons of duplicate code you're wasting tokens, and probably more importantly wasting engineer hours reviewing duplicate code.
In some cases it might be a fair trade, in moderation. In general it's certainly wrong.
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)
On the contrary: that's precisely what a bad abstraction would not offer.
Instead it would spread its assumptions to different parts of the system, as every caller, sub-service, etc. would have to change shape to fit in that abstraction's box, however unnatural it is (and we know it would be unnatural, because we already said it's a bad abstraction).
Abstraction is not the same as encapsulation.
But so does duplication, in practice, and it diverges more as it does.
Oh, it happens all the time.
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.
That's true only for "good" abstractions. Bad abstractions will often require you to change code in all the places using it, requiring you to understand how all of them work and what are their requirements, _all at the same time_.
The other end of this spectrum is dealing with the architecture astronaut's up-front abstraction. Totally overengineered for solving the initial requirements, but then constantly needing new hacks to make it cope with new requirements as they come up in the normal course of work.
That's why there's a balance in there, it's somewhere between "always duplicate code even when you know a lot about the problem" and "always write abstractions even when you know very little about the problem."
The security bugs were all in features I never wanted.
A bit of simple duplication would have been golden.
A uses the abstraction, but finds the API doesn't work. Fixes that.
That causes B to have to make a tracking change which induces a bug. B realizes that the API isn't quite right. Fixes it.
That causes A and C to make tracking changes. These induce more bugs. C fixes the abstraction to avoid these cases.
This breaks A and B so they decline to update.
And so on. This is what a bad abstraction looks like. API "fixes" bouncing around the code as they reflect off of the bad abstraction.
Doesn't it mean that you are in a good place to start DRYing code? I mean, code was written in a way to avoid bad abstractions. You can't generalize on 1-2 samples, but now you have "unknown numbers" (more than two?), so you can start looking at it an see patterns. It means you can create a perfect abstraction. It is the basis of the WET (Write Everything Twice) principle.
It would be frustrating, and I mean really frustrating. People are easily generalize over two things but they struggle to generalize over three. Pick two random words and think of a common category they fall into. It is an easy task for 5 years old. Pick three random words and try to generalize them, you would have a very hard cognitive task.
This frustration stems from the inherent complexity of the task. It is not because people before you wrote duplicating code, it is because it is hard to generalize. People before you didn't do it being afraid of missing things and creating a bad abstraction, but you have hard data, you can create an abstraction without missing a thing.
Exactly. The abstraction purists are not working in the messy, dead line driven real world.
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.
I agree that LLMs are naturally anti abstraction machines.. I'm often trying to find way to reverse that.
I am a bit of an LLM cynic but I am trying to learn it all, and I have to say I have spent most time trying to work out: how do you explain how a brown-field codebase actually works, in such a way that the LLM won't pervert it through misunderstanding.
It does encourage you towards the "conventional" coding standard for any new project, because you want to use a pattern that it will have seen in its training set.
But for example there are differences of opinion in how wordpress plugins (which have a very complex control flow) should be structured. LLMs are incredible at knowing how WP works, actually, but what is difficult is explaining how your methodology for a large plugin is going to work.
It is a battle — but a useful one because it can be used for, er, studying the comparative belief systems of the LLMs.
A story I like is that in the now lost era of handwriting recognition on PDAs, Jef Raskin concluded that the easiest way to solve the problem was to change handwriting so as to meet the algorithm in the middle.
That is, to find a noticeable simplification of handwriting that people could learn quickly and that eliminated hard-to-process quirks.
I feel I am there with the LLM at the moment, trying to work out what the common ground is.
But if I tell it "read these files that use the same conventions" first, there's no misunderstanding, and the agent also picks up the general "tone" of the code. I have very little to tweak if I've defined the problem well.
Oh that is a bloomin' great idea, and I can fully see how it might work better.
Can't tell you how valuable this comment has been to me and now I feel so much better about evidently kicking a hornet's nest ;-) Thank you so much.
If you're using a coding agent like codex or claude code, I've also seen marked improvement by telling the agent to keep a journal of decision points, and every file read or written. And then, here's the important part, read the last five journals before starting. It primes the context with whatever you were working on and keeps a new session more focused that if it has to go searching for keywords through the whole codebase. It can also be an interesting read.
Of course it's a truism if you just say any abstraction that works is a good abstraction.
That is not what I am saying at all. Bullshit abstractions at least let you control the problem. Duplication doesn't.
I agree with you that it’s a truism, but it’s useful advice for people who have a habit of trying too hard to DRY their code. IIRC the author comes from the Ruby world, where DRY was a big thing, and this talk was part of the pendulum swinging back away from this DRY obsession that sometimes just resulted in convoluted code.
It really depends on the exact type of code we're working with, and what our objectives are.
In my case, I often use object inheritance. It's a damn cheap way to DRY. However, when people hear "inheritance," they often think "polymorphism." There's a really big difference between the two, but popular culture has jammed them into one ball, and it's not worth the agita, to try to explain the difference.
But if you are doing optimization, long stacks can be your enemy, and inheritance tends to have long, windy stacks.
In these cases, the copy/pasta method may well be the best approach.
Like I said, "It Depends."
I agree that we should think of inheritance and polymorphism separately. If we want to express this intent in object-oriented code, how can we use inheritance to deduplicate code, while preventing misuse of the resulting object hierarchy i.e. the use of base classes in a polymorphic context?
In C++, IIRC private inheritance would do the trick (you cannot static_cast DerivedWidget * to BaseWidget * if DerivedWidget : private BaseWidget), but most OO languages don't support private inheritance. It's also not possible, as far as I know, to "lock down" BaseWidget * so it cannot be used as a base class pointer from any derived class: instead, you have to apply the private inheritance to every derived class to enforce this rule.
Another approach is to use has-a instead of is-a: i.e. instead store a BaseWidget object as a member of DerivedWidget. This allows for re-use without supporting polymorphism.
This is especially true, with languages like C++. Someone (I have heard it attributed to Bjarne, but I don't think he said it) said "With C, you can shoot yourself in the foot. With C++, you can blow your whole leg off."
But there's stuff that can basically, only be done in C++. It's a very powerful, mature, and storied tool; meant to be used by competent grownups.
In tech, we have folks that seem to be absolutely convinced that we can have tools, so marvelous, that we can hire total incompetents, and that they will magically write good code. I know of no other engineering discipline, or craft, where people think like this. They usually have rigorous career ladders, with lots of gates.
Maybe Finance sometimes lets knuckleheads behind the wheel, but then, you get things like the Barings Bank disaster.
"What's Barings Bank?" you ask. "It doesn't exist! Is it a hallucination?"
No, it is not. Unfortunately, they let a rather junior trader, named Nick Leeson, behind the wheel...
It's possible that LLMs may finally give us something like what people want, but I suspect that we'll be seeing folks stumping around on one leg...
But in one of the scenarios I mention earlier, I earned a chunk of money once fixing an issue that emerged in a subcontractor's four or five line duplication that had ended up rippled through a long-lived codebase. A ground truth (MySQL version) changed, and the pattern broke everywhere, including places where it had evolved.
So I tend towards thinking, yes, any three-line pattern that is likely to appear everywhere should, perhaps, be centralised.
It's certainly worthy of serious consideration. Usually pretty easy to maintain the surface of such an abstraction.
Code that is coincidentally similar very often diverges in either the short or long term, and DRYing it up aggressively tends to result in functions that have many boolean parameters that each trigger disjoint sets of behavior - which is a bit of a nightmare to maintain due to the high cognitive overhead of remembering how all the interleaved-but-actually-unrelated behaviors should work.
This outcome is low-cohesion code.
It's a useful concept to be aware of - worth clicking through to the actual content of the talk rather than just the headline.
I've seen this article and AFAIR the video before, and FWIW having been a Rails developer from the very early days and fitfully until maybe even 2014, I now interpret the phrase "my Railsconf talk…" quite negatively.
ETA: nice to be back to disagreeing with people on HN about coding principles again though. Hopefully this is a sign.
What tends to happen is in your hands.
ideal case: support libraries and then very simple duplicated code that is easy to read and modify. critically the core control flow should remain duplicated, but simplified by the support libraries.
Starting with abstraction when you are only beginning something rarely works well and leads to code bases littered with interfaces having only one implementation.
Abstracting the code when you have two copies does not always pay off, especially when you end up not needeing more than just two copies anyway.
But once you have three copies, it's indeed time to start generalizing.
The context a decision is evaluated is particularly important for "rules of thumb" like this. There's the rule of 3 (which many senior engineers imparted to me earlier on in my career) - don't refactor until you've actually duplicated it thrice, but even so, what they speak of is a catch-22 that's pretty important to reason about carefully.
On one hand, if you overcorrected on the fear of abstraction, you could easily end up with 500 duplicates that are slightly different and need to be maintained 500 different ways, slowly causing slightly wrong behavior some of the time, data corruption, combinatoric explosion. Surely, once there is such a situation, some degree of abstraction is the only right decision.
On the other hand, if you overcorrected on the fear of duplication early on, you could easily end up with a premature optimization and complexity -- complexity which, most importantly, could be rooted in a gap of understanding of how the code will be used and what direction it may go in over time (often based on which direction the business will go over time).
The only answer that actually works, of course, is "somewhere in the middle." Obviously, that's pretty vague and not very useful. Where, exactly, in the middle IS the right place?
As the years have gone by, I've become more and more steadfast that the answer to that question is and must be an art and not a science. Of course, it must always be rooted in practicality, the actual context of the code around it and where the code/business was in the past and where it will be in the future.
But just as importantly, some of it must be based around beliefs in the face of imperfect information about what you want to invest in for the sake of the technology, the team that develops it, and the business that relies on it. It could be that for your team, your values make it make sense to go a little bit further than "good enough" on normalizing your data modeling, because the way you like to run your business requires that normal form to do the analytics and make decisions productively. It could be that for your team, your values make it make sense to go a little bit further than "good enough" on splitting service boundaries and ensuring clean queues and message passing infrastructure, because you have seasonal spikes where you need to scale up to a ton of load and then scale down after without constantly doing a song and dance or pre-provisioning fragile infrastructure.
But the most common thread there is - art, not a science. Every single decision depends on YOUR team, YOUR business, YOUR needs - and like any art, there is no universal rule or discovery or best practice in the industry that will magically work for your needs without working through the details of whether it appropriately fits your situation or not.
So with that said - I can't really agree with you. At any place I've ever worked with a competent team, maintaining duplicate code is just not that hard and follows the same process for being dealt with. Built a robust test suite that encodes the actual differences and the shared structure. Pull out the pieces that have a good reason to be abstracted and redesign the pieces that encode the true differential structure in a way that is intuitive. Lather rinse repeat. It's always straightforward because it's known - by the time you are doing this process, you've had tons of repetitions and data on what is driving you to develop the abstraction, so when you make the decision, you are making it empirically.
Conversely, I have seen many otherwise competent teams slowed to a halt with premature abstraction. Frameworks that were well intended and reduced duplication, but encoded coupling between components that at a certain point in the businesses progression, fought with reality rather than aided, and all because they were frozen into place before anyone empirically had really clear data about whether the abstraction would be worth it long term. Well intended "clean code" refactors that were meant to solve the old "bad duplication" but instead created a far more difficult to reason about "abstracted base" of code that didn't really solve any of the domain modeling problems and was just as difficult to maintain without introducing buggy behaviors (if not more so) than before.
The biggest problem is that premature abstraction is sexy and fun. There are incentives and dopamine hits from doing it extraneously. But fixing legacy duplication is not fun. And so when it gets done, it tends to get done in a pragmatic way to relieve pain rather than to elicit pleasure. That, I believe is one of the biggest confounding sociological aspects of this whole discussion.
Some previous discussions:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927149
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27095503
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739596
There has been growth since but it's been concentrated into fewer channels and somewhat industrialized.
I read “Practical Object-Oriented Design (POODR)” ages ago at this point, but it reshaped how I approached OOP
Granted… OOP as a default paradigm has fallen out of favor (at least for me), but it’s still everywhere & won’t be going away. She gives a great framework for making it sane
To help with that, I think the simple model of two callers depending on a common code needs to be scrutinized. If the common code needs to change because only one of the caller needs it, then it doesn’t belong in the common.
The wrong goal for DRY is attempting to do it with encapsulation. Encapsulation shifts the refactoring work from the caller to the common code. However this is not what you want because there’s a lot more consequence in updating the common code than the caller.
You can avoid encapsulation and still be DRY by having multiple thin abstractions that the caller needs to be aware about is better. In OOP you are taught SRP and IoC for this. In procedural programming, this just comes naturally as code calling series of helper functions.
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927149 - May 2023 (69 comments)
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27095503 - May 2021 (17 comments)
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739596 - July 2020 (240 comments)
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578714 - July 2018 (207 comments)
Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061453 - July 2016 (96 comments)
The Wrong Abstraction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11032296 - Feb 2016 (119 comments)
The Node ecosystem is full of wrong abstractions.
Not that I'm immune from choosing the wrong abstraction sometimes. More than once the "other people" was me. We all make mistakes.
Even better is an old school MPA with progressive enhancement.
Yes, okay. But with both you will have a bad time cleaning up.
There is a third option: good abstractions.
I did see this pattern described in the blog in practice a lot (and fell victim to it myself) and I think that in general this comes down to inexperienced programmers. Object oriented programming makes it worse.
Teaching these programmers that they should not abstract is not the solution. It is blocking their growth.
Teach them how to make better interfaces instead.
To me, the question is: can you look at this abstraction and understand why it exists, without knowing who’s calling it? If so, it’s probably fine.
If an abstraction only makes sense because of the particular weird details of these 3 callers that have to pass mutually exclusive arguments to it to get their desired behavior, it’s probably wrong. An abstraction needs “a place to live” in your architecture. It needs to be self-evident in justifying its existence.
If you find yourself repeating code, but de-duping it would create these sort of weird non-self-justifying abstractions, your architecture is probably a bad fit for the problem you’re trying to solve. Maybe that’s because the problem changed since the software started (which is a bit of a pickle: do you re-architect, or do you continue writing weird inscrutable code?) or maybe it’s because you just picked the wrong abstraction in the first place. But you should recognize it: duplicating vs wrong-abstraction is about choosing the lesser evil. If the abstraction was a natural fit for the problem, you wouldn’t need to answer this question in the first place.
Code duplication and 'wrong' abstractions both count themselves amongst the other foibles of programming. But they don't directly produce a cost which can be cheap or expensive.
They produce some other high dimensional intermediate value which can then produce highly variable cost dependent on the domain, goals, and scenario.
As ever, it depends.
The depends is quantifiable, but it doesn't fit in a blog post. Think more along the lines of war and peace.
Copy and paste once is fine, twice, not so much.
Often I've seen two totally different things exist in one bit of code, no overlap!
Premature generification is bad, and leads the developer to believe that two things are the same, making it harder to see they are not.
Also, can make it much harder to see that a different abstraction would give a cleaner outcome....
Unsurprisingly, that goes for just about any idea in software development. I worked in one code base that heard small functions are best, so every function was less than three lines long. You don’t gain anything by replacing `lst.get(0)` with `get_first_item_in_list(lst)` (in fact, understanding becomes much more difficult), but breaking down functions into the smallest units that make sense independently within the business domain can be very helpful, both for understanding and testing.
It's of course possible to functional-ize segments of logic, but then the question of state mutation must be brought up. How isolated are these changes from other parts of the code / system state. Can this be run in parallel or is it something that must be serial? What potential race conditions exist?
If you have code that is reusable, you'll want it to have a nice interface. But, you don't need an abstraction on top of a nice interface. Just use it.
For abstraction, what you need to focus on is "What is most likely to change in the future?" You want to put in abstractions that will make those changes low-cost.
Ex: At work there was a small debate about which C++ JSON parser to use with no stand-out winner for our framework's needs. So, we picked one and I put a thin layer over it for everyone to use. We have since then swapped out the parser and swapped it back over the years of a hundred devs using it in our framework and no one noticed the swaps.
On the other hand it is pretty difficult and error prone to consolidate duplicated code which have drifted apart over time.
If in doubt, chose the approach which is simplest and least risk to revert if you discover in the future you made the wrong choice.
I do agree a bad abstraction can cause huge problems. But it’s usually not the kind of abstractions introduced to eliminate code duplication, but the kind of top-down “architecture astronaut” abstractions, where a model is chosen which does not fit the complexity of the problem.
Having a wrong abstraction means you end up with a class/function/module with a huge amount of configurations through boolean/enum parameters. It's not even clear that all combinations of configurations is even valid. This situation may be simplified by duplicating, and then eliminating code, thus creating more streamlined code for each use case. This may require fixing similar or cross-cutting bugs in multiple places (eg: JSON serialization is stupid, need to hack a workaround), but keeps the business logic changes simple. Maybe a bit more numerous, but the code is able to raise all the scenarios to consider.
Having no abstraction means you may have to change business logic consistently in multiple places, or you have to fix exactly the same misconception (aka a bug) in multiple cases. e.g. tax rate management in a multi-national context. This is also terrible, because you may fix an important problem in one place and forget other places with the same issue. Now you missed 12 potential bugs by fixing one. This can however allow you to discover a true abstraction. Maybe these 12 places should call just one place?
But for code evolving across a team understanding this tension, a bit of duplication while waiting for confirmation that these pieces of code break together and change together is better than just shoving the same 3 if-statements into a function to avoid "line duplication". Concept duplication is more important.
This step should also be parameterized by how many times the duplication has occurred. Refactoring preemptively may lead to poor abstractions, but not refactoring after seeing the exact same thing tens of times would also be weird. See also:
I've worked in too many projects, where every new feature needs to be built on top of existing abstractions, that often lead to severe restrictions if something slightly different is required. I always try to create reusable units/components, that can either be used as intended or replaced by something that behaves slightly different if needed.
Components are not necessarily frontend components, this extends also to backend logic.
You hardly ever change the thing and if you do, changing it in two or three places 'manually' is really not a big deal.
Now changing something fairly often, that affects logic in 50+ places? Then it makes sense to automate with an abstraction so it all flows through the same lines of code.
I know I've personally spent way more time over the years debugging bad abstractions than changing things in a few places.
I think DRY is the first heuristic for “good code” that most junior devs actually grasp, and so they become very dogmatic about it for a while
Refactoring code to reduce the number of lines is _compression_, akin to RLE coding.
Refactoring the code to lift conceptually coherent parts is _abstraction_.
Less compression, more abstraction. Then you're fine.
Some of the biggest rabbit holes come from naming conventions not aligning across the business and technology silos. If everyone agrees that Customer has exactly 34 attributes, then it is possible to move to the next step of sharing libraries of types across the team. Getting your POCOs/DTOs 1:1 across the board is when the duplication really starts to melt away.
Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner
by Chris Hanson and Gerald Jay Sussman
https://archive.org/details/software-design-for-flexibility_...
IMO it's easier to inline a bad abstraction than it is to consolidate a bunch of subtly different things that should have been abstracted from the beginning.
But I expect people's opinions on this differ wildly based on their personal experiences. Just my anecdotal take.
When I started writing code 40 years ago, I used to over estimate my understanding and abstraction skills a lot. As a result I created overly complicated and difficult to maintain/evolve solutions.
Turns out I need to see more examples of patterns before making good choices, which means becoming comfortable with seeing and tracking duplication over time.
Abstraction is a vague term when used here. Is a shared function an “abstraction”? It’s more like implementation hiding, maybe some data hiding. But you definitely have a dependency on it now.
Acronyms like DRY are for beginners. Once you get good you know when to break the “rules” (and when not to).
But if I have an interface and three subclasses with duplicated or almost duplicated code, this is quite easy to find.
That’s much nicer than an abstract base class where only some children override the methods, because now I need to check which ones actually do.
Of course, the worst abstractions are the ones you don't need at all.
Also I’ve seen the kind of codebase that seems to be LZW packed due to the sheer desire to DRY everything out. Not pleasant thing, by the time you goto 10 layers deep on some “helper” function you forgot why you in there.
Combined with another interesting idea "whatever I dislike is wrong", it makes me _always be right_, which is awesome. I can never lose a discussion about abstraction with this powerful combo.
The urge to split the code up since they beginning is generally a bad idea; it forces early abstraction; more likely to be wrong.
OP is right that code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction, but the opposite is also true - the right abstraction is far cheaper than code duplication.
Perhaps "recompilation" - rewrite by replaying all prompts in strict code quality context (linters, complexity & dedup checks) would make better abstractions.
The only problem now is that LLMs are non-deterministic.
Compiled assembly code is not an input to the next compilation; source code is an input to the LLM's next inference.
Sure, maybe "prompts are the code," but you must realize that code is also the prompt.
Do you want to iterate using for loop or using .iter().step(2).map()?
I would rather have consistency than a mixed bag of levels of abstractions.
I don’t think it matters, specially for sort sized loop scopes
This isn't really a good example, assuming both can be used to represent the same thing.
The problem with the wrong abstraction is when your abstraction doesn't let you represent something. Then, because of you've already invested so heavily into it, you start contorting the problem to fit your abstraction and it becomes a shit show.
But beyond that, any stable abstraction is better than duplicated code.
Otherwise what is better is better and we don't know what we don't know
Pro tip - which is the least bad abstraction? Answer: it depends!
You cannot find the edges of the system with structure you don't understand because once the abstraction are set in place solutions often have the same shape as the frameworks which leads to ultimately really bad systems.
The best way is often not the obvious way. Once you reach the edges then you can think how to program the abstraction but that is many versions down the line from the original.
With AI, we really need to rethink the clean code principles.
Generalizing this in the abstract is a wrong abstraction.
Usually, some moron decided to copy paste things a few levels up and then the top half of the system metastasized into two parallel universes of broken garbage.
For instance, one might decide to perform auth later in the flow so unauthorized handlers can run and set a “this requires auth” bit that defaults to false, and the other flow could add a forged auth header before the auth step.
Now, the auth handler needs a “allow forged header” flag and a “already authenticated” flag.
I’ve seen that grow to a half dozen cases until massive production dataloss occurred. A buggy client tried to delete something local to their account without specifying a userid as a parameter (this codebase was garbage!) and deleted the something for all users instead.
I can’t remember how the dataloss was “fixed”, but it definitely wasn’t “all requests go through a simple auth check, and all handlers declare/implement their auth requirements in the same way”.
Getting a design approved to require a user id be specified exactly once for account-level operations was fantasy land for that team. (Most hires with any sort of engineering talent bounced in under a year.)
Anyway the “abstractions are hard so copy paste” approach did provide job security for the lifers on that product. I can’t imagine them holding a job elsewhere, but they were completely immune to layoffs (hostage style).
This is a pretty valid approach if you’re an agent hired to perform industrial sabotage, or if you keep replacing keyboards after you knaw through the corner.
Very true in some sense, but I continue to encourage DRY-bias because I've literally never seen teams duplicate code responsibly and later dedupe it when it's the right time. 95% of the time this sentiment is quoted to justify shipping quick slop and stable reusable bits are never extracted into a shared lib later.
Maybe this is an area where AI can help identify duplicate code though to show opportunities for de-duping
https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015
Previously discussed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17090319
Things that should be tightly coupled but are not is preferable to things that should not be tightly coupled but are.
I agree especially because coupling things is easier than uncoupling things.