alt Hacker NewsHardly iconoclastic, it's a very sensible suggestion.
It would be iconoclastic if the common sense basic approach would be to start with abstraction. It's not, the common sense default is to write possibly duplicate behavior until you actually discover several cases to abstract away, until you bevalop a sensible idea of which functionality unites them and which doesn't carry over all of them.
>Once you have an awkward number of customers (more than five and less than a hundred), maintaining duplicated code that should have been abstracted and modularised will only seem cheap if you don't mind that you burn through even junior employees at a pace
Maintaining the wrong abstraction, or, god help, abstractions, would be even worse.
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At work there’s been a huge number of duplication in the start of the company and no solid abstraction. So no tests as well. We introduced tests in the current architecture but rewriting code has a huge cost to make sure there is no regression. When we talk about a saas it’s non-trivial with many customers relying on this tool daily as part of their workflow, regressions because of rewrite could be really painful for them. So we must give a greater budget to take the time to make sure nothing major breaks. So there is a debt that is compounding over time because code is added. Duplication is bad and weird/purist abstraction could make the architecture so rigid that rewriting things could generate hard to understand and catch bugs. It’s hard to find a good balance and it depends on the kind of business and scale of project. Hard to make that a generic advice.
The real rule is probably: duplicate until the abstraction stops looking like a horoscope.
Yeah, "Write Everything Twice" is a pretty common and sensible direction for any codebase
> Maintaining the wrong abstraction, or, god help, abstractions, would be even worse.
Hard disagree. When you've had to chase through a change in untold and actually unknown numbers of duplications of code in different permutations and fix them because they are all on fire simultaneously, you'd disagree too. A bad abstraction would at least have had one fire in one place.