One of the most useful pieces of programming advice I have been given is to make an abstraction on the third time you solve a given problem. It encourages makin

One of the most useful pieces of programming advice I have been given is to make an abstraction on the third time you solve a given problem. It encourages making abstractions for common tasks, but also acknowledges that in a large codebase the wrong abstraction is an order of magnitude more expensive than not having an abstraction at all, and it's unlikely that you have enough information to make the right abstraction the very first time you are looking at a problem. As with all things, there is a cost (slightly more code duplication for rarely-solved problems) but also huge benefits in having really solid abstractions built from lots of experience.