The Law of Leaky Abstractions
One of the greatest programmers in history, who did indeed understand every component of the computer from the software down to the chip, Niklaus Wirth, wrote “the belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail
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If you find yourself in this situation, resist being driven by sunk costs. When dealing with the wrong abstraction, the fastest way forward is back . Do the following:
- Re-introduce duplication by inlining the abstracted code back into every caller.
- Within each caller, use the parameters being passed to determine the subset of the inlined code that th
The Wrong Abstraction — Sandi Metz
Why do large systems disintegrate? The process seems to occur in three steps, the first two of which are controllable and the third of which is a direct result of our homomorphism. First, the realization by the initial designers that the system will be large, together with certain pressures in their organization, make irresistible the temptation to
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