Sometimes there’s a fine line between Abstraction and Obfuscation. Developers can get carried away when writing code. Worrying too much about is this abstract enough and not about how complicated the code has become. I work on a site that’s been passed down a few times. I can tell that the original developer put a lot of time into the design. I recognize a lot of different pattern usage through the site. Unfortunately I see a lot of places where things have been overcomplicated. Its become really difficult to make simple changes because of all the layers of abstraction that I have to go through to implement them.
Most of the books out there that teach OO design talk about Abstraction, but they don’t warn about Obfuscation at all. Its a shame.
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