4 ms·

I agree with this so much. The way I've put it before is, the difference between under-engineering and over-engineering is that you can fix under-engineering.

• contravariant 8y ago
  Personally I don't think that's entirely true. Both under- and over-engineering can be hard to fix. What definitely does make things easier is simply having less code to fix. Although measuring the 'amount' of code is at least somewhat subjective.
  • targafarian 8y ago
    Yes! I think what I've come to is: Spend more time thinking about how to do something more concisely, rather than spending time thinking of how to abstract the code. Sometimes the former leads to the latter. But less code--or rather more concise code (not to be misrepresented as "fewer characters" or "everything in one line"!)--is almost always better for maintaining the code into the future.
• wvenable 8y ago
  Under-engineering makes it hard to fix common issues because there is no common code to fix. You can find yourself scouring over thousands of lines of code never sure that you found all the places you need to find. This is why DRY is a solid principle. I think there is always the problem that programmers want to apply all these principles, including DRY, without actually thinking about it. Once it's applied illogically you are in strange and awful territory.
• l39 8y ago
  You can fix under engineering only when it is under control. Too much of under-engineered code may lead to bloated codebase which quickly becomes unmanageable.