Seeing that Uncle Bob is making a new version of Clean Code I decided to try and find this article about the original.

  • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
    1·
    3 months ago

    Because abstractions leak. Heck, abstractions are practically lies most of the time.

    What’s the most time-consuming thing in programming? Writing new features? No, that’s easy. It’s figuring out where a bug is in existing code.

    How do abstractions help with that? Can you tell, from the symptoms, which “level of abstraction” contains the bug? Or do you need to read through all six (or however many) “levels”, across multiple modules and functions, to find the error? Far more commonly, it’s the latter.

    And, arguably worse, program misbehavior is often due to unexpected interactions between components that appear to work in isolation. This means that there isn’t a single “level of abstraction” at which the bug manifests, and also that no amount of unit testing would have prevented the bug.

    • dandi8@fedia.io
      0·
      3 months ago

      How do abstractions help with that? Can you tell, from the symptoms, which “level of abstraction” contains the bug? Or do you need to read through all six (or however many) “levels”, across multiple modules and functions, to find the error?

      I usually start from the lowest abstraction, where the stack trace points me and don’t need to look at the rest, because my code is written well.