Too many layers of abstraction -- worthless crap (2007)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2007/02/02/performance-problems-survey.aspx

by acqq • 15 years ago

25 10 15 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

acqq2• 15 years ago

The results of a survey:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2007/02/08/performance...

pointyhat• 15 years ago

I see #2 (over-abstraction) daily. People pick an "architecture" and almost religiously apply it without concern as to whether or not it's too complicated for the job at hand, which it usually is.

wisty• 15 years ago

Interesting - a lot of people are saying that #2 has become more common with time.

ntoshev2• 15 years ago

Well, #2 should be "the code is a mess" which sometimes is a result from too many layers of abstraction, sometimes from improper abstractions, sometimes from lack of abstractions. In my experience novices underengineer, while experienced coders do tend to overengineer.

acqq2• 15 years ago

No, it's not "a mess." People who write it follow a lot of rules. The problem is, following rules just "because it should be done so" and uncritically applying them leads to very weird things (^) I believe you haven't seen what a lot of programmers working under bad lead can produce in a year of two out of the simple goals... Really experienced programmers don't "overengineer."

(^) It looks like: "public class RecursiveFactorialImplementation implements FactorialAlgorithm" from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2143310

ntoshev2• 15 years ago

I agree with you, I just say there are other similar sources of avoidable complexity.

watmough• 15 years ago

If #1 is pervasive throughout an application, e.g. badly done SQL code, then it can be a pain to get performance up, but with #2, there may be no way to get the codebase back under control, or bring new developers on at a reasonable pace.

I think the consensus seems to be that #1 is manageable, but #2 is a potentially project threatening issue.

It's a shame that 'You Ain't Going to Need It' hasn't permeated to all areas yet, but with many people working at cost+, hours billed often tends to be maximized in worse projects. It's a shame that there's very little mechanism to be paid more for doing a great, undramatic job, than a 50% over-budget cluster-flock code-dump that people hate.

praptak• 15 years ago

I choose point 3. - not too many layers of abstraction but rather a bad abstraction model which, sort of, results in 1. (bad algorithm). Not because an inexperienced programmer did it, but because the architecture makes an efficient algorithm impossible to implement.

The best example that comes to mind is the "n+1 selects" problem in bad ORMs: if your ORM hides the power of SQL joins behind a crappy abstraction, then you need n selects for what could be achieved with one.

protagonist_h• 15 years ago

From my experience, it's not "over-abstraction" per se which is causing performance issues. Rather, it's that people who work at the upper levels of abstraction don't understand how layers below work. E.g. web-developer not understanding what SQL their ORM library generates and how database execute that SQL. Abstractions are supposed to hide details at certain level. However, in practice you still need to understand how things work at lower level, as Joel Spolsky's famous Law of Leaky Abstractions states.

I've seen that problem frequently in the world of enterprise software, where you often have many layers developed by different groups of developers. Developers at level N treat level N-1 as black box. This often leads to performance issues.

Silhouette• 15 years ago

I would give a lot to work only on projects where there were too many levels of abstraction. It's a very real problem, I agree, but at least it implies that the people working on the project understand the concept of abstraction and trying to build a large code base with some kind of systematic design. The most common alternative seems to be having little deliberate software architecture at all, and that is much worse.

Too many layers of abstraction -- worthless crap (2007)

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