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For most tasks programming it's more an engineering discipline than an intellectual pursuit. In that context complexity must always be justified.

I know, and have been told, to have written hard to read code. In my case it's usually vectorized code in numpy or a C or cython extension for really hot code. But I always have a good reason, usually performance when it matters.

It's usually said that premature optimization is the root of all evil, but it's nothing compared against premature abstraction. Optimization at least is local in its nature while abstraction tends to expand all over a code base, and when the assumptions made for the abstraction no longer hold people is still forced to keep dancing for a music that no longer plays.

"Educate yourself" assumes that your interests are everyone's interests but this is a vast field and not everyone has interest nor time to learn about category theory. Most probably your coworkers are quite intelligent. If they are not interested in your idea it may be that it's not appropriate or maybe not correctly framed, or not mature.



I'm stealing that phrase: "Premature abstraction is the root of all evil". It's hard for me sometimes to justify in a code review why an abstraction is not required (yet) when someone has put some effort into it.


I found this in another thread and it sounds like you might enjoy it also:

https://sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction




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