There you have the gambling, the risk, the reason why programming isn't mechanical. One has to use judgement. Some generalisations are quite cheap, others very

There you have the gambling, the risk, the reason why programming isn't mechanical. One has to use judgement. Some generalisations are quite cheap, others very costly. It's always worth using the cheap ones and very important to use the expensive ones carefully. e.g. Use a named constant rather than a literal - that's hardly ever a bad generalisation...or making repeated code into functions. OTOH, writing all your code in e.g. asynchronous python on the assumption that you might need it to be async next year....that's an expensive effort which may never ultimately be justified. You have to be fairly sure that you will want it. It's also worthwhile to use languages that support change. So you can tell yourself that upgrading your code won't be an impossible pain in future. C++ is not one of those flexible languages so you feel pressure to get it right first time.