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Post-Architecture: Premature Abstraction Is the Root of All Evil (arendjr.nl)

submitted 4 months ago by arendjr to c/programming

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With this post I've taken a bit more of a practical turn compared to previous Post-Architecture posts: It's more aimed at providing guidance to keep (early) architecture as simple as possible. Let me know what you think!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

To 1), that's unfortunately not entirely true. The real abstraction criticized is more like introducing a StorableEntity layer that's provided by a StorableEntityBuilderFactory. So instead of providing a compartment with a stable interface, they introduce a mess of generalizations.

Abstractions should be bulkheads, but in practice they're often more like one of those beads-on-strings door decorations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@agressivelyPassive moving from 'storing a user in postgres' to 'storing anything in postgres' is a step up in abstraction. Same with moving to 'storing a user somewhere' or moving to 'storing anything anywhere'.

Moving from 'storing an entity' to 'storing an entity via a FacadeBuilderFactory' is not a step up in abstraction, it's only an extra indirection.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

No, that's my point. Providing the builder factory as an abstract way to construct an entity, it is an abstraction. It removes you from the actual detail, that's an abstraction. But it also introduces extra complexity, which in turn negates the value of the abstraction.

In reality, the intention is an abstraction, the result is often enough a bad abstraction that introduces more complexity and adds indirection.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

@agressivelyPassive if you routinely call indirections abstractions, then 'premature abstraction is the root of all evil' holds. If you separate the two concepts, you might think differently.

If my team's codebase had a business logic class that had a concrete dependency on an EntityBuilderFactory, I'd vomit a little, but I wouldn't delete it (can't piss off too many people all the time). But I would route around the damage by allowing the class to depend on the EBF *or* something else.