4 ms·

So true. Premature generality is a big problem.

• jandrese 9y ago
  IMHO this is one of those things that only experience can help with. Nobody wants to be the guy adopting a single-use codebase to a somewhat different problem and having to rewrite half of it, but overgeneralizing from the start leads to complex and bloated programs that are hard to deploy anywhere--where the effort to deploy it is about half as much as it would have required to write a custom solution from scratch... My personal philosophy is to keep the dependencies to a minimum and make judgement calls on simplicity versus generality. I probably err on the side of simplicity a little too often, but I also get asked to deploy solutions on non-internet connected devices fairly often. Solutions that you can deploy out of a tarball on a base CentOS 5.5 machine are good sometimes.