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This is my experience as well. It takes a long time to grok what the program does and how it does it because of all the layers of indirection, even when the program is fairly simple. While this style might make small changes easy if you understand the code, the inertia to larger changes because of the layers of indirection is immense.

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Wow that's on-point, agree that in many past projects "inertia to larger changes" is exactly how I would describe so-called Clean Code.

It's that small changes like adding getters and setters give an easy-to-follow PR, a false sense of accomplishment for both the author and the reviewer, and ton of dopamine with that. While important changes, that actually deliver business value or repay technical debt, become increasingly difficult to do without replacing massive amounts of code and redoing the file structure.

Inertia is the biggest demotivator.

Yeah, you can't eliminate essential complexity by narrowing your view, it will just obscure the big picture.

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