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Creating generic programs or, all code should be easily replaceable

Architecting a system to be reusable and composable in yet-unknown-ways is hard, sometimes stupid, but usually worth it.

It's probably fine.

There's wisdom in trying to avoid looking too far in the future and focusing on getting something working. We're often constrained by time, user needs, existing constructs like legacy code, and (obviously) lack of 20/20 hindsight that may convince us later on we should have thought of something earlier.

But stuff so often gets built that is obsolete almost immediately after shipping. Needs change, or another tangential project needs to interface with your system. But there isn't an interface! And the code is so focused on achieving a single goal that adding in a second is difficult. And after you jam the second in there, adding a third is probably impossible. So you start over.

On the other hand, being too concerned with making everything reusable can be paralyzing. It's impossible to think of all possible use cases up front, and at a certain point what matters is getting the job done.

I think successfull systems are defined by how many parts you can break them into. Like when you need to add goal #2, how easily can you explode the system, understand its contituents, and put it back together.

The difficulty inherent in understanding large systems is at the core of this. Large systems have a lot of surface area. Without clear boundaries between entities within the system, someone will pick up a ticket, tack a method here and a prop there, and suddently previously independent things rely on one another.

You wouldn't write an interface createUserOfTypeX(...user) without first creating a lower-level interface like createUser(typeX, ...user). The more you can create edges with well defined low-level interfaces, the more opportunities you'll have to compose them into something new if the need arises.

A lot of this stuff hardly requires thought, and doesn't add time. The time you'll safe unit testing vs integration testing may be enough on its own.

No one should be thinking "all code has to be reusable". Actually, I think a better phrase is all code should be easily replaceable.

P.S.

2022-02-02

Hot take. Another way to summarize this post might be "don't write object-oriented code". Tbh though I'd just be curious to see an OO codebase that doesn't suffer from blurry domain edges and unecessarily interrelated code. Not sure I've encountered one yet.