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> It is that trivial. > You will make a mistake. You will never get it perfect. You just have to deal with it. These two comments sound at odds. First stateme

> It is that trivial. > You will make a mistake. You will never get it perfect. You just have to deal with it. These two comments sound at odds. First statement says it's easy. Second statement says it's hard. We can agree that hard things don't get solved without iterating. But a productive response to abstraction (which is really API design) being hard is not to say "stop handwringing, just do it." Instead, you can employ various strategies such as preferring experienced people to do it, making sure they did a good job of gathering requirements and considered the risks of their approach, spending time testing customer/developer ergonomics, etc. You can also defer producing an abstraction until your system is a bit larger and the duplication is becoming too much to handle, since you have a larger sample size of potential uses for your abstraction to help you converge on the correct API. Good abstractions can be the difference between success and failure, between organizational velocity and technical debt quagmire. Saying "we should always build abstractions" when it's difficult to build them correctly in one go sounds totally wrong on its face.

wvenable 3y ago
Trivial doesn't mean easy; it's means unimportant. And in this case I'm referring to the whole idea of abstraction or not. You're going to do it. You should do it. Sometimes you have to do it. Discussing it is pointless. Just move on to the how. > Saying "we should always build abstractions" when it's difficult to build them correctly in one go sounds totally wrong on its face. If you don't do that first "one go" how do get around to right abstraction? You're telling me you wouldn't use any intuition, planning, or thinking to build that first wrong abstraction? It seems above you just described how to do exactly that. Just writing without any abstraction in mind at all is just a huge waste of time. The only time it's painful is when you decide that you can't change anything you've done. But doing no abstraction is just as painful -- you just pay for it differently.
- kajecounterhack 3y ago
  Okay Mr. English, trivial may be defined as unimportant / trifling but if you're gonna label something like that then you have you consider why you're calling it unimportant. Still seems you're saying it's cheap, easy, and undoable. It's not. Abstraction building is _consequential_. > If you don't do that first "one go" how do get around to right abstraction? Right back at you: how do you get the data about how to build your abstraction without first living without one to understand what parts of the system should be abstracted? Starting with the abstraction and assuming you can fix it later is a luxury for overstaffed teams and people working on systems that nobody actually uses. You do realize, abstractions incur mental load on your users? Have you ever tried to use internal tools built ostensibly for your use case, only to find that it's taking more time and effort than if you lived without one? It's happened to me so many times, and the consequence of adopting a shitty abstraction has burned me so many times personally that I'm gravely aware of the downsides. Consider a streaming data tool that stupidly allowed users to put arbitrary data in a string field, which became abused for purposes it shouldn't have been used for -- now it's critical to the company and would take a YEAR of dev resources to retire, all the while being an endless source of headache and P0 SRE escalations. Consider an ML evaluation tool that requires you to understand how a bunch of leaky abstractions nest together. When you finally figure out how it works and it does 1 thing for you (generate P/R curves), it becomes extremely difficult to modify or debug without again understanding these horrible abstractions. Once you've spent a full quarter adopting it, you wish your team had just written something custom-but-maintainble instead of trying to get shoehorned into a tool that clearly wasn't thinking about you, and whose owners have left the company leaving you to absorb the cost. > But doing no abstraction is just as painful -- you just pay for it differently. It's less painful in the long run: doing no abstraction to start is often the right path. People often overrate the benefits of abstraction and underrate the clarity of repetition, especially when the repetition is trivial.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    > how do you get the data about how to build your abstraction without first living without one to understand what parts of the system should be abstracted? The minute I have any duplicated logic it gets combined as much as possible. I hate duplicating anything. Some duplication is impossible to avoid and I hate that too. I hate specifying the same logic in 2 places (say client-side and server-side for web validation). I will do anything possible to avoid that. Good abstractions reduce mental load. I wouldn't be able to manage 20+ different applications if they didn't share a huge amount of common internal framework and have as a little duplication of logic as possible. I'm actually pretty militant about ensuring every abstraction is a programmer benefit and will remove layers if they serve no purpose. I almost always build things out as a library. If we are consuming an external service, I will make that it's own library/framework to be consumed by the project it interacts with. Even if it's only ever used by one project. This is always more work initially but has never failed to be right choice.
    - kajecounterhack 3y ago
      > Good abstractions reduce mental load. Yes, in sum, but bad ones increase it, and it's not always immediately obvious to everyone that an abstraction is bad. A lot of that comes from experience. > The minute I have any duplicated logic it gets combined as much as possible. I hate duplicating anything. Some duplication is impossible to avoid and I hate that too. I hate specifying the same logic in 2 places (say client-side and server-side for web validation). I will do anything possible to avoid that. Good for you Glenn Coco! Work in any scaled software organization and you'll see that combining logic too early is full of hazard. > I almost always build things out as a library ... This is always more work initially but has never failed to be right choice. Maybe to you. I wonder if someone who's ever tried to use your library down the line ever thought "this was abstracted in a really suboptimal way but I have to live with it." Even if they did, I don't think you'd know. I've been that person too many times. People have got to stop building shitty libraries when they're not necessary and only serve to obfuscate the logic.
      - wvenable 3y ago

wvenable 3y ago

Trivial doesn't mean easy; it's means unimportant. And in this case I'm referring to the whole idea of abstraction or not. You're going to do it. You should do it. Sometimes you have to do it. Discussing it is pointless. Just move on to the how. > Saying "we should always build abstractions" when it's difficult to build them correctly in one go sounds totally wrong on its face. If you don't do that first "one go" how do get around to right abstraction? You're telling me you wouldn't use any intuition, planning, or thinking to build that first wrong abstraction? It seems above you just described how to do exactly that. Just writing without any abstraction in mind at all is just a huge waste of time. The only time it's painful is when you decide that you can't change anything you've done. But doing no abstraction is just as painful -- you just pay for it differently.

kajecounterhack 3y ago
Okay Mr. English, trivial may be defined as unimportant / trifling but if you're gonna label something like that then you have you consider why you're calling it unimportant. Still seems you're saying it's cheap, easy, and undoable. It's not. Abstraction building is _consequential_. > If you don't do that first "one go" how do get around to right abstraction? Right back at you: how do you get the data about how to build your abstraction without first living without one to understand what parts of the system should be abstracted? Starting with the abstraction and assuming you can fix it later is a luxury for overstaffed teams and people working on systems that nobody actually uses. You do realize, abstractions incur mental load on your users? Have you ever tried to use internal tools built ostensibly for your use case, only to find that it's taking more time and effort than if you lived without one? It's happened to me so many times, and the consequence of adopting a shitty abstraction has burned me so many times personally that I'm gravely aware of the downsides. Consider a streaming data tool that stupidly allowed users to put arbitrary data in a string field, which became abused for purposes it shouldn't have been used for -- now it's critical to the company and would take a YEAR of dev resources to retire, all the while being an endless source of headache and P0 SRE escalations. Consider an ML evaluation tool that requires you to understand how a bunch of leaky abstractions nest together. When you finally figure out how it works and it does 1 thing for you (generate P/R curves), it becomes extremely difficult to modify or debug without again understanding these horrible abstractions. Once you've spent a full quarter adopting it, you wish your team had just written something custom-but-maintainble instead of trying to get shoehorned into a tool that clearly wasn't thinking about you, and whose owners have left the company leaving you to absorb the cost. > But doing no abstraction is just as painful -- you just pay for it differently. It's less painful in the long run: doing no abstraction to start is often the right path. People often overrate the benefits of abstraction and underrate the clarity of repetition, especially when the repetition is trivial.
- wvenable 3y ago
  > how do you get the data about how to build your abstraction without first living without one to understand what parts of the system should be abstracted? The minute I have any duplicated logic it gets combined as much as possible. I hate duplicating anything. Some duplication is impossible to avoid and I hate that too. I hate specifying the same logic in 2 places (say client-side and server-side for web validation). I will do anything possible to avoid that. Good abstractions reduce mental load. I wouldn't be able to manage 20+ different applications if they didn't share a huge amount of common internal framework and have as a little duplication of logic as possible. I'm actually pretty militant about ensuring every abstraction is a programmer benefit and will remove layers if they serve no purpose. I almost always build things out as a library. If we are consuming an external service, I will make that it's own library/framework to be consumed by the project it interacts with. Even if it's only ever used by one project. This is always more work initially but has never failed to be right choice.
  - kajecounterhack 3y ago
    > Good abstractions reduce mental load. Yes, in sum, but bad ones increase it, and it's not always immediately obvious to everyone that an abstraction is bad. A lot of that comes from experience. > The minute I have any duplicated logic it gets combined as much as possible. I hate duplicating anything. Some duplication is impossible to avoid and I hate that too. I hate specifying the same logic in 2 places (say client-side and server-side for web validation). I will do anything possible to avoid that. Good for you Glenn Coco! Work in any scaled software organization and you'll see that combining logic too early is full of hazard. > I almost always build things out as a library ... This is always more work initially but has never failed to be right choice. Maybe to you. I wonder if someone who's ever tried to use your library down the line ever thought "this was abstracted in a really suboptimal way but I have to live with it." Even if they did, I don't think you'd know. I've been that person too many times. People have got to stop building shitty libraries when they're not necessary and only serve to obfuscate the logic.
    - wvenable 3y ago