Post-Architecture: Premature Abstraction Is the Root of All Evil
Post-Architecture: Premature Abstraction Is the Root of All Evil
Practical tips that allow you to build an evolving architecture
With this post I've taken a bit more of a practical turn compared to previous Post-Architecture posts: It's more aimed at providing guidance to keep (early) architecture as simple as possible. Let me know what you think!
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abstraction != indirection. Abstraction allows you to do a deferred architecture: store this user "somehow". Indirection is just early architecture with more steps: MyUserDatabase class is coupled to one way of doing things - it's concrete, not abstract.
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yet another article advocating 'pure functional' flavour, not a pure functional PL. Recommending purity in an impure language is like recommending memory safety in C. All the work is on the programmer.
4To 1), that's unfortunately not entirely true. The real abstraction criticized is more like introducing a StorableEntity layer that's provided by a StorableEntityBuilderFactory. So instead of providing a compartment with a stable interface, they introduce a mess of generalizations.
Abstractions should be bulkheads, but in practice they're often more like one of those beads-on-strings door decorations.
2@agressivelyPassive moving from 'storing a user in postgres' to 'storing anything in postgres' is a step up in abstraction. Same with moving to 'storing a user somewhere' or moving to 'storing anything anywhere'.
Moving from 'storing an entity' to 'storing an entity via a FacadeBuilderFactory' is not a step up in abstraction, it's only an extra indirection.
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I would suggest indirection is one of the forms of abstraction? Making abstractions to “defer” architecture seems quite counter-intuitive to me, since the thing you’re deferring is implementation. But the architectural part — the abstraction — gets front-loaded. The idea that an abstraction can truly abstract the “how” of user persistence is very much the kind of fallacy I warned against when it comes to leaky abstractions. Do you want to use
asyncmethods for persistence or not? Do you want to persist is batches or not? How will you be notified of completion or errors? The answers depend very much on actual architectural implementation, and if you had created an upfront abstraction you may very well find it won’t suffice if any of these variables changes. So no, I don’t think that really defers architecture at all, it merely solidifies your current assumptions about how your architecture will probably look like in the future. If any of these assumptions turn out wrong or simply undesirable later, you’ve made things harder for yourself. So if that’s the risk anyway, it’s fine to just stick with a simple concrete solution when you can.I do agree pure functions are harder to do in impure languages, but it’s not as bad as your example of C. Rust is very much an impure language, but its borrow-checker helps you to enforce purity constraints. In fact, using pure functions there is a great way to avoid getting into fights with the borrow-checker. If you use TypeScript you can use Immer to aid you, which is also included in the Redux Toolkit.
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I've always heard of your "post-architecture" referred to as "evolutionary design".
2Sure! The other day someone called it emergent architecture. I guess it goes by multiple names :)
2It goes really well with YAGNI. Also DRY without YAGNI is a recipe for premature over-architecting.
This is also one of the main benefits of TDD. There was a really good video that I can't find again of a demonstration of how TDD leads you to different solutions than you thought you use when you started. Because you code exclusively for one single requirement at a time, adding or changing just enough code to meet each new requirement without breaking the earlier tests. The design then evolves.
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