I think it’s down to the systems, and I think the people who favour abstraction often forget who needs to write it. Duplication isn’t just cheaper than the wron

I think it’s down to the systems, and I think the people who favour abstraction often forget who needs to write it. Duplication isn’t just cheaper than the wrong abstraction, it’s cheaper than almost any abstraction. Not because it should be, mind you, but because duplication works for a tired Thursday afternoon programmer and abstraction doesn’t. Maybe it’s because I spent some time in management, but a key concept I worked with when I did that was how we have two modes of mental capacity. One where we have the energy and wit to do the right thing, and one where we haven’t slept for a week, and, well… it’s Thursday afternoon after a day of too many useless meetings. I think the best way I saw it put was for a Theme-park to coin a slogan that any employee would be able to find inspiration in when dealing with a customer on that Thursday afternoon. To me most abstractions are similar to having a slogan along the lines of “Think Different”, which is an absolutely useless concept when you’re tired and dealing with an angry customer in your summer job about an hour before you clock out. I obviously don’t think you should avoid all abstraction. The author of the article is right, theoretically at least, it’s just that this way of thinking rarely works out. Similar to you, my experience is that it tends to fail after a few years of changing needs. These days I favour abstraction only when it’s use is never altered in the slightest. For everything else duplication is so much easier to handle over 5+ year periods. Of course there are many ways to deal with this. Small single purpose functions are abstractions as well, just don’t build big OOP hierarchies. Because they just don’t work for those Thursday afternoons.