[piekvorst]

Nice article, never seen that.

I’ve always thought it’s good practice for a system to declare its limits upfront. That feels more honest than promising ”infinity” but then failing to scale in practice. Prematurely designing for infinity can also cause over-engineering—like using quicksort on an array of four elements.

Scale isn’t a binary choice between “off” and “infinity.” It’s a continuum we navigate with small, deliberate, and often painful steps—not a single, massive, upfront investment.

That said, I agree the ZOI is a valuable guideline for abstraction, though less so for implementation.

[o11c]

There's a reason I prefer "lots" over "infinity".

For your "quicksort of 4 elements" example, I would note that the algorithm doesn't care - it still works - and the choice of when to switch to insertion sort is a mere matter of tuning thresholds.