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Whenever this article is posted it amazes me. People seem to only reply to the title, and ignore the substance of it. The point is not to "not abstract" or "rule of 3". The point is requirements change, features are added, and when an abstraction becomes wrong, tear it out.

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Yes, and then potentially rebuild it based on what you know now! No one reads that part.

> The point is requirements change, features are added, and when an abstraction becomes wrong, tear it out.

I like this phrasing a lot, thanks for this!

I'm still wondering if there's also potential in avoiding the wrong abstractions in the first place. For that we'd need a "cheap" way to decide whether an abstraction is good/bad/something else.

Is there generally applicable, widely accepted principles or research around this? A quick search only revealed random blog posts; nothing I'd consider widely accepted.

> Is there generally applicable, widely accepted principles or research around this

J. Ousterhout is gaining traction, at least in my corner of the industry. https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs190-winter18/lect...

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