I have an overriding design principle that helps find where that balance should be: "Attempt, within reason, to minimize the number of places a reader must look

I have an overriding design principle that helps find where that balance should be: "Attempt, within reason, to minimize the number of places a reader must look in order to understand the code on his or her screen. Minimizing the number of changes required to alter functionality is a secondary but lesser goal. Minimizing the number of characters the programmer must type to implement functionality is explicitly a non-goal." For large C++ codebases at work, this leads to coding standards like: - Don't introduce typedefs referencing other typedefs in public API, especially when the typedefs and the API that uses them are in different files. Having to look in more than half a dozen different files just to understand the signature of a function is actively reader-hostile. We have a ton of conventions similar to this that help to make the code significantly more pleasant to read. It turns out that we still have quite a few useful abstractions, but they tend to be fairly large compared to most codebases I've worked with previously.