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by nhteou79snt 3246 days ago
> Premature refactoring is incredibly harmful to readability.

Is that a thing? If it is, I've never run into it. I always run into the opposite - never refactoring and everything turning into a god object. It never occurred to me that premature factoring would be bad because I can't recall ever running into it!

1 comments

I've seen plenty of this. The most common offenders are junior to mid-level developers who, in the pursuit of attaining the trappings of sophistication, cargo cult various patterns without understanding the original rationale behind those patterns, nor when they should be applied. What they fail to realize is that needless indirection is not the same as useful abstraction.

Think what you will of Zed Shaw, but he actually has a pretty good piece on how indirection and abstraction get mixed up:

https://zedshaw.com/archive/indirection-is-not-abstraction/

Haha, interesting.

I always assumed abstraction was only a special case of in direction. Indirection on a meta level.

Like loops are abstractions for jumps, but this means that you "indirectly" use jumps when using loops.