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by piva00 639 days ago
> For example, I might have a Widget that must always have an ID but when I am creating a new Widget I could just write "Widget - {.id}" rather than have to define an entire WidgetCreateDTO or some such.

In this case you're preferring terseness vs a true representation of the meaning of the type. Assuming that a Widget needs an ID, having another type to express a Widget creation data makes sense, it's more verbose but it does represent the actual functioning better, you pass data that will be used to create a valid Widget in its own type (your WidgetCreationDTO), getting a Widget as a result of the action.
1 comments
1propionyl 639 days ago
> Assuming that a Widget needs an ID, having another type to express a Widget creation data makes sense, it's more verbose but it does represent the actual functioning better

I agree with this logically. The problem is that the proliferation of such types for various use cases is extremely detrimental to the development process (many more places need to be updated) and it's all too easy for a change to be improperly propagated.

What you're saying is correct and appropriate I think for mature codebases with "settled" domains and projects with mature testing and QA processes that are well into maintenance over exploration/iteration. But on the way there, the overhead induced by a single domain object whose exact definition is unstable potentially proliferating a dozen types is developmentally/procedurally toxic.

To put a finer point on it: be fully explicit when rate of change is expected to be slow, but when rate of change is expected to be high favor making changes easy.

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piva00 638 days ago
> What you're saying is correct and appropriate I think for mature codebases with "settled" domains and projects with mature testing and QA processes that are well into maintenance over exploration/iteration. But on the way there, the overhead induced by a single domain object whose exact definition is unstable potentially proliferating a dozen types is developmentally/procedurally toxic.

> To put a finer point on it: be fully explicit when rate of change is expected to be slow, but when rate of change is expected to be high favor making changes easy.

I agree with the gist of it, at the same time I've worked in many projects which did not care about defining a difference between those types of data in their beginning, and since they naturally change fast they accrued a large amount of technical debt quickly. Even more when those projects were in dynamically typed languages like Python or Ruby, relying just on test cases to do rather big refactorings to extrincate those logical parts are quite cumbersome, leading to avoidance to refactor into proper data structures afterwards.

Through experience I believe you need to strike a balance, if the project is in fluid motion you do need to care more about easiness of change until it settles but separating the actions (representation of a full fledged entity vs representation of a request/action to create the entity, etc.) is not a huge overhead given the benefits down the line (1-3 years) when the project matures. Balancing this is tricky though, and the main reason why any greenfield project requires experienced people to decide when flexibility should trump better representations or not.

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1propionyl 638 days ago
> Through experience I believe you need to strike a balance, if the project is in fluid motion you do need to care more about easiness of change until it settles but separating the actions (representation of a full fledged entity vs representation of a request/action to create the entity, etc.) is not a huge overhead given the benefits down the line (1-3 years) when the project matures. Balancing this is tricky though, and the main reason why any greenfield project requires experienced people to decide when flexibility should trump better representations or not.

I am in complete agreement, and this is why experienced architects and project managers are so key. Effective software architecture has a time dimension.

Someone needs to have the long term picture of how the architecture of the system with develop, enforce a plan so that the project doesn't get locked into or cut by early-stage decisions long term, but also doesn't suffer the costs of late-stage decisions early on, and manage the how/when of the transition process.

I think we could have better tools for this. Some of them in libraries, but others to be effective may need to be in the language itself.

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