[quietbritishjim]

I absolutely agree with this. I always like to say, the best way to make code extensible in future is to make it do its current job as simply and clearly as possible.

If you leave a hook in for some feature you "know" is coming you'll only screw it up - either that feature won't be needed or it'll look different than you expect. Your field validator is a great specific example, I think I'll use that one in future.

(A corollary of this though is that you have to be happy to ruthlessly refactor existing code when a new requirement actually does enter the scene, because of course that requirement was deliberately not prepared for in the existing code.)

[edejong]

A hook is not an abstraction. A validation function is not an abstraction.

An abstraction would be to say: "These programming statements are actually objects." Or, the time and ordering constraints implied in this program should be explicit.

In addition, I was talking about anticipation and preparation of abstraction. Not the actual abstraction.

[quietbritishjim]

> A hook is not an abstraction.

By "hook" I didn't mean anything specific, like a React Hook. What I meant was adding some extra abstraction that has no purpose except for some future feature. For example, taking a class that works perfectly well on its own (let's say Rectangle in a drawing program) and separating it into a base and derived class (let's say Shape and Rectangle) in anticipation of a feature in a future release (next time we're going to add a Pentagon class too and that'll need to derive from Shape). If you don't consider that change to be adding an abstraction, then I suppose we just have different ideas of what an abstraction is.

> In addition, I was talking about anticipation and preparation of abstraction.

I wonder if you've just used a word that doesn't reflect what you really mean. Maybe you just meant designing and creating an appropriate abstraction for the current requirements? "Anticipate" would be the wrong word for that.

"Anticipate" literally means making an educated guess about some future event before information about it becomes available. Most of us have experienced other devs aniticipating future requirements, and creating abstractions in response to that anticipation, and the inevitable negative fallout of that. So seeing "anticipation ... of abstraction" is bound to generate a negative emotional response.