Re:Why general inheritance is flawed and how to finally fix it
by rsj_hn on Sunday December 12, 2021 @10:27PM
(#29536273)
Yeah, I had a few connectors (API clients to different APIs with some business logic wrappers to handle low level stuff) and decided that they should share code with a generic connector interface, and then when one of them changed it was pretty painful untangling it. There is a tradeoff between getting stuff done and abstraction engineering, and there are costs to premature abstraction engineering.
I followed every principle of good code, except one, DRY. I tried to make generic parts to connectors, because they do have similarities. But this is a work of at least a year, and the price to make it generic was increasingly more complex configuration files (Just the pagination alone added 3 variables for two different APIs, and the number of app i am supposed to interact with should grow to ~40). I decided after a few days of reflexion that the idea was not that dumb in principle, but unworkable in my case, and decided that one connector for one API, even with a lot of repetition.