> The first time this happens the programmer will undoubtedly be much more well informed about the connections between the pieces of code and will have an actual case of them being related, which is why it's much better to delay any abstraction until that point.
In a perfect world maybe. And even then it would be better not to accumulate issues until they start hurting. But in the real world there are often people, who never had these issues on their calendar and will not be willing to allow for sudden fix it time.
> Future-proofing and playing oracle about the future needs of code is generally a dead end but the programmers least capable (i.e. junior programmers and/or Clean Code enthusiasts) of playing that game are also the most likely to do so.
I don't need to be an oracle to tell, that 10 times the same code will incur the need to change 10 places instead of 1. I don't need to be an oracle to write code, that from the beginning can expect some change in business needs.
I am fed up with people thinking, that developers are like little babies, who never learn anything from their past experiences. All in good measure of course. If I tell someone, that I see a problem for the maintainability of the code of some project, because it cannot easily be extended in ways, that are likely to happen due to business needs, I expect them to take me serious and not belittle my experience. Engineering is my discipline, and often not theirs.
I have build systems, that anticipated changing requirements and they did change just like I thought they would. How did I do it? By making parts of the code work in "additive" ways. I cannot state exact details, but there was some project about checking values of variables and give some result of whether the values were correct. The values were of various types, so they required various kinds of checks. For example string edit distance. In such a situation it is already foreseeable, that at some point you might want to add checks that check the values in different ways. For example number equivalence and then later on equivalence with some epsilon, some allowed deviation from the correct value. So I implemented it in a way that I can register checks. That way one can add a check later and register it, without changing existing code. These things can be anticipated and a good design will allow for change later easily. No need to be an oracle. Just need some experience.
I'm not sure you and the OP are even in significant disagreement. When exactly did the OP say developers are like babies who don't learn from experience? From my perspective, the OP seems to be critiquing the culture of indoctrinating inexperienced and/or developers into the cult of clean code. It is the clean code camp that is more likely to dismiss experienced engineers as unenlightened dinosaurs.
In a perfect world maybe. And even then it would be better not to accumulate issues until they start hurting. But in the real world there are often people, who never had these issues on their calendar and will not be willing to allow for sudden fix it time.
> Future-proofing and playing oracle about the future needs of code is generally a dead end but the programmers least capable (i.e. junior programmers and/or Clean Code enthusiasts) of playing that game are also the most likely to do so.
I don't need to be an oracle to tell, that 10 times the same code will incur the need to change 10 places instead of 1. I don't need to be an oracle to write code, that from the beginning can expect some change in business needs.
I am fed up with people thinking, that developers are like little babies, who never learn anything from their past experiences. All in good measure of course. If I tell someone, that I see a problem for the maintainability of the code of some project, because it cannot easily be extended in ways, that are likely to happen due to business needs, I expect them to take me serious and not belittle my experience. Engineering is my discipline, and often not theirs.
I have build systems, that anticipated changing requirements and they did change just like I thought they would. How did I do it? By making parts of the code work in "additive" ways. I cannot state exact details, but there was some project about checking values of variables and give some result of whether the values were correct. The values were of various types, so they required various kinds of checks. For example string edit distance. In such a situation it is already foreseeable, that at some point you might want to add checks that check the values in different ways. For example number equivalence and then later on equivalence with some epsilon, some allowed deviation from the correct value. So I implemented it in a way that I can register checks. That way one can add a check later and register it, without changing existing code. These things can be anticipated and a good design will allow for change later easily. No need to be an oracle. Just need some experience.