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While unexpected features can definitely complicate something that was merged into an abstraction, bug “fixes” also matter and they can be worse: - Programmers

While unexpected features can definitely complicate something that was merged into an abstraction, bug “fixes” also matter and they can be worse: - Programmers may look at a bug in a simple shared function and conclude that it “obviously” should be fixed, and do so quickly without really understanding what else could go wrong. (As a completely contrived example: You “fix” something that previously couldn’t return a negative value, and move on; turns out this “fix” allows a bug somewhere else to crop up, a catastrophic improper cast from signed to unsigned, blowing up your -1 into an iteration over billions of expensive operations.) - Bug priority levels vary between features, even if code is shared. Your abstraction may make it effectively impossible to fix just one high-priority feature, if your deployment is (say) set up to run hours or days of regression tests on all affected parts. Generally, the more segregated things actually are, the easier it is to set priorities well. Just because something is duplicated doesn’t mean that it’s that way forever, either. At a good branch point, such as a new project, you can aggressively prune out things that won’t apply to that branch even if they helped keep things stable on the previous project.

hinkley 8y ago
My own read in this situation is that this problem is almost always less of an issue in code that is very explicit about what it’s doing. A function that uses nouns and verbs with a very precise meanings survives these changes better than wishywashy code. “Generic” functions make it difficult to find all uses or even understand what scenarios they belong to. With bland say-nothing nouns and meaningless verbs like execute() or process() that appear everywhere in the code, you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

hinkley 8y ago

My own read in this situation is that this problem is almost always less of an issue in code that is very explicit about what it’s doing. A function that uses nouns and verbs with a very precise meanings survives these changes better than wishywashy code. “Generic” functions make it difficult to find all uses or even understand what scenarios they belong to. With bland say-nothing nouns and meaningless verbs like execute() or process() that appear everywhere in the code, you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.