Don't Solve My Problem.

Can't Use Enums for Constants

I was asked to see this because sometimes there's just too much abstraction https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2668355/how-much-abstraction-is-too-much

The accepted answer links to some useful design principles. Read the answer. It's useful.

The question objects to abstract superclasses without much (or any) actual implementation. I've seen folks toy around with frameworks where there are classes that introduce a name, but little else. So I understand the complaint. I once tried to use Python classes as surrogates for Java interfaces. It was a bad idea. And irrelevant to solving the underlying problem.

The problem that lead to the "yet another abstraction" complaint, however, was not related to a design with empty layers of framework abstractions. It was not related to classes used to define an interface-like feature in Python. It wasn't related to *anything* in the Stack Overflow question or answer.

The "yet another abstraction" complaint was based on Python not having constants. Seriously. How did we get here? Right. They don't want a solution. They want to complain.

I lift this situation up to folks who are trapped in conversations where things devolve into bizarro-world like "Yet Another Abstraction is bad" when we're not talking about abstractions. The solution is simple, but, it's not what they wanted so, it's labeled as bad in some way.

The solution is bad because it's unexpected. Consequently peripheral, tangential, weird-ass nonsense will show up in trying to avoid an unexpected solution.

Can't Assign Numbers

There's an API to load some data. They have 100's of clients happily loading data. In some cases, the clients must assign numbers in addition to names; it's a disambiguation thing. Most of the time, the name is good. In a few cases, (name, number) is a two-part key because they have multiple instances with the same name.

We're good here. The data structure's key can be (name, number) and the default number is zero. Works for almost everyone.

Almost everyone. Exception they have one client who cannot count or enumerate their data.

Really.

The client can't even pre-process the data to add numbers because reasons.

The stated reason is "the data originates off-line and the numbers might be inconsistent." The key needs a number. It doesn't need to consistent. The point is asking the client to own the identity -- a name and a number.

The solution seemed easy. Assign a number. If your data comes from a spread-sheet, use the row number. The =row() function works. Use that. If your data doesn't come from a spread-sheet write a tiny utility to laminate a number into the data. This doesn't seem hard. And then the client owns the object identity.

Nope.

Can't do it. The web service will have to assign the number for them.

It's not a difficult feature to add. It's a complicated, stateful default value. This will turn into trouble tickets in the future when the numbers are unacceptable because they change with each load or something even more obscure than that.

Can't Fork a Repo

This isn't recent, and I may not have the details right. But.

The team had evolved an approach where they had several different pieces of software spread among multiple branches in a single Git repository.

This was weird. And they were -- of course -- about to start having CI/CD problems as they moved away from manual builds into a world of git commit hooks and relatively fixed CI/CD pipelines.

And they were really unhappy. They liked having multiple branches in a single repo. The idea of forking this into separate repos was unacceptable. Unworkable. Breaks everything. (Breaks everything they had. Everything they needed to replace. Or so they claimed.)

They had some vision of having the CI/CD jobs all reworked to move beyond the common dev/master world into their uniquely odd world of lots of parallel branches, each it's own private "master". But all in one repo.

They seemed to have locked into a strange world view, and weren't happy discarding it. The circular discussions of how multiple repos would break something something in their something was more examples of tangential, irrelevant discussion to cloak empty whining.

tl;dr

I think there are people who don't really want a "solution." They want something else.

There are people who have a vision: How Things Should Be (HTSB™,) They seem to be utterly unwilling to consider something that is not literally their (narrow) vision of HTSB.

It's very much as "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up" situation. It's exasperating to me because of the irrelevant side-channel discussions they use to avoid confronting (or even stating) the actual problem.

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Star moon<noreply@blogger.com>

2019-03-25 14:15:06.714000-04:00

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Can't we paint the bikeshed blue, And by it le...

smitty1e<noreply@blogger.com>

2019-03-19 08:30:55.041000-04:00

Can't we paint the bikeshed blue, And by it let my pony chew, Eternally, cow-like, its cud, While we wallow in our FUD?