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I've learned the hard way that perfect abstractions don't exist. The mathematician in me wants to find the "most elegant representation" of a given problem, but

I've learned the hard way that perfect abstractions don't exist. The mathematician in me wants to find the "most elegant representation" of a given problem, but when I give in to that urge, I often end up with a god function that takes `n` boolean flags that toggle the behavior slightly for different cases. Why does this happen? I think a partial explanation is in this Nietzsche essay [1], where he says, "every concept arises from the equation of unequal things" — in other words, the abstractions of the world were built bottom up in our heads, and the Platonic essence of things is just a fairy tale we tell young programmers so they can sleep easily at night. 1. http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_various/on_truth_and_lies.htm http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_various/on_truth_and_l...

twhitmore 6y ago
A key insight can be to abstract behaviors, rather than state. It is typically much more possible to cleanly abstract the behavior for a single interaction/ role, than for the entirety of an entity's state. If you have multiple interactions you might want to use more than one interface. Once you have clean behavioral APIs for your interactions, you may also be able to use composition, wrapping and delegation to implement/ enhance behavior. This is the 'Strategy pattern'. The one thing you lose here is object identity -- you can no longer assume a delegate is the entity itself. This is no big loss given the clarity & flexibility that are gained.