[joshstrange]

I agree that you should strive to not make "clever" code since it requires more cognition to parse later (and none of us have perfect memories). I try to strike a balance between reusable code that doesn't have 1 million flags/params to handle all the cases and writing straightforward code.

It's easy for developers to look at 2 components and see the overlap and a lot of, normally junior, developers go overly-DRY and the readability and usability suffers for it.

I'll take verbose over clever every day but at the same time I think this blog author goes a bit too far in assuming there was no use for a base class at all. I agree that the base class does not need to support every eventuality but a good base class would provide the base implementation with an easy way for subclasses to override the logic as needed. And no, tons of hooks probably aren't the way to do that either.

We have some code where I work that I wrote as a base implementation of some CRUD logic but it requires your implementation to create stubs for get/put/delete/iterate/etc that call the internal logic. I got some pushback on this because "I have to write this boilerplate when I just want a straight passthrough" but I'd seen this play out enough times to hold my ground and, while I'm biased of course, I think it's proven successful in the long term. At the start you might just need to do a straight pass-through but business logic always changes or evolves and while on day 1 you might not appreciate having to write "boilerplate" you will be thanking yourself 1 month, 6 months, 1 year down the line when you need to modfiy default flow. If a class never goes pass the "boilerplate" then great! But as soon as it does you'll be thankful for how easy it is to modify.