As always, the right way is somewhere down the middle. I recently inherited a blob of "scientific code" with basically no abstraction. Need to indicate the sam

As always, the right way is somewhere down the middle. I recently inherited a blob of "scientific code" with basically no abstraction. Need to indicate the sampling period? That'll never change--just type .0001; that'll never change. Need to read some files? Just blindly open a hardcoded list of filename and assume it's okay--it'll always been like that ? And of course, these files are in that format and there's no need to check. Of course, after this code was written, we bought new hardware. It gathers similar data, but samples at a completely different frequency, has a different number of channels, and records the data in a totally different way. We could fork the code, find-and-replace the sampling rates, and all that, and maintain a version for each device we buy. Or we could write a DataReader interface, some derived versions for each data source, and maybe even the dreaded DataReaderFactory to automatically detect the filetypes. Guess which approach will work better in a few years?