A Random Thought on Over-Generalizing

Warning! Some information on this page is older than 6 years now. I keep it for reference, but it probably doesn't reflect my current knowledge and beliefs.

Mon
26
Jul 2010

I don't post next part of the description of my reflection system yet. Instead I just want to share a small thought that came to my mind today. It's about over-generalizing, over-engineering, writing overly-abstract code or however you call it. Using too much OOP is not only the matter of code perfomance, but something deeper, more ideological. Interesting blog entries about this topic are: 5 Stages of Programmer Incompetence (see "The Abstraction Freak" paragraph) and Criminal Overengineering @ yield thought, Smartness overload and Smartness overload - addendum @ mischief.mayhem.soap. A Counterpoint can be found at cbloom rants. And finally here is my idea:

It is a vicious circle. Here is how it works:

But I believe this is true only to some degree. We obviously need a general, universal code sometimes not to do the same, monotonous or error-prone work over and over again. That's why we create and use libraries. And that's why I've coded my reflection system :)

New: I can see similar vicious cycle in a programming language development, inspired by an article I've read today: Google engineer calls Java and C++ too complicated. For me it looks like this: software engineers, companies and committees develop very sophisticated programming languages because they want them to be as much general and universal as possible so developers don't have to learn and use many specialized languages for different purposes. Developers don't like to learn many new programming languages because they have bad experience from learning and using such universal, spohisticated languages.

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