[nlyan]

Generalizing is part of how you'll be smarter later though. You cannot generalize something unless you understand its essence.

It's easy to confuse abstraction (choosing to deal with one, possibly newly contrived, concept over another) and generalization (reducing the number of concepts required to explain something to a minimum). The former is like building a Haswell CPU from a description of 70s microcontroller architecture, whereas the latter is like trying to figure out what CPUs were like in the 70s by looking at a Haswell core under a microscope.

[a3n]

> Write your code for this game only - not for a future game.

The quote refers to a future product, one that is very likely unspecified at best, and more likely just something that an individual contributor dreamed up. Unless we have some sort of multi-phase contract, how do we know we'll ever build another thing like this again?

Markets change, hardware changes, experience changes. Hell, building this thing may show you that you should never build another one like it.

Generalize where sensible inside the project, sure. But as the quote says, build what you're building, not what you're not.