Genrralizing is only helpful for the future; in the present, it doesn't do much (unless you're simplifying egregiously complex code -- but this doesn't require

Genrralizing is only helpful for the future; in the present, it doesn't do much (unless you're simplifying egregiously complex code -- but this doesn't require a generalization, just hygiene). Thus, every generalization is a guess, at best based on previous experience, unless you already know you're going to repeatedly use it already. So you'll always have some kind (experienced-based) hueristic; you might as well define one explicitly to go by, as a rule of thumb