[ljm]

I love articles like these because every time I'm naïvely expecting to learn something new, but more often than not I'm left unsatisfied.

It's always the same pattern and it's like the programmer's version of the one weird trick. Show ten lines of (contrived) code and talk about its potential to be flawed, and then 'fix' it by explaining 50+ lines of code that has to be abbreviated or split into pieces to keep the article flowing. What quality actually means in this context is unclear, but it feels like tidying your bedroom as a child: hide the clutter in various places to give the appearance of cleanliness, while actually creating more of a mess for the next cleanup in the process.

And like many programming maxims, advising to abstract early is just as bad as advising to not abstract at all. Better abstraction will become more apparent as you see how your system fits together and how parts of it can be lifted up to a higher level, and this kind of intuition will only come with patience and experience.