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0 pointsliampulles5mo ago0 comments

As a Go developer, I do think that I end up writing more code initially, not just because of the lack of syntactic sugar and "language magic", but because the community philosophy is to prefer a little bit of copying over premature abstraction.

I think the end result is code which is quite easy to understand and maintain, because it is quite plain stuff with a clear control flow at the end of the day. Go code is the most pleasant code to debug of all the languages I've worked with, and there is not a close second.

Given that I spend much more time in the maintenance phase, it's a trade-off I'm quite happy to make.

(This is of course all my experience; very IMO)

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miohtama5mo ago

How much is premature in time? 10 years? 20, 30 years?

liampullesOP5mo ago

So for me, the question is: are these two things intrinsically the same or coincidentally the same? If it is intrinsically the same, then an abstraction/centralization of logic is correct. If they are coincidentally the same, then its better to keep them separate.

Its premature if I don't know the answer to that question with my current information, which is a common scenario for me when I'm initially writing a new set of usecases.

If I get a 3rd copy of a thing, then its likely going to become an abstraction (and I'll probably have better understanding of the thing at the time to do that abstraction). If I don't get a 3rd copy of that thing, then its probably fine for the thing to be copied in 2 places, regardless of what the answer to my question is.

ted_dunning5mo ago

On the other hand, when your abstraction has more configuration options than methods, it is a sign that (years ago) it really wasn't an abstract at all.

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