Abstraction Can Make Your Code Worse 

The one design principle every programmer learns is "Don't Repeat Yourself", and it's not very helpful on its own. I wouldn't broadly say that abstraction increases coupling, but you can't make design decisions simply by looking for repeated code. Your abstractions should represent real concepts in the system that allow you to speak about them using natural language. Done properly, this actually decreases coupling, in a way that not only makes it easy to add new behavior, but also makes it easy to isolate each component for testing.

To me this is the most significant difference between new programmers and very experienced ones. Being able to identify and choose the most valuable abstractions in a given context is what drives business value from raw development. Its troublesome because the emphasis on OOP in programming education leads many newer devs to implicitly value abstraction above all while not understanding the complexity they may be incurring. Choosing the right abstractions takes a lot of experience and must be informed by context. Even an apparently 'correct' abstraction may not be the right choice when considering the business context, general experience of the team, and even delivery deadlines; software engineering doesn't happen in a vacuum.

In my experience. The fun thing about programming, is that it does not matter how much you are aware of. Or how many suggestions you have gotten. You will still end up making regretable mistakes reguardless. Whether this is poorly abstracted elements or just flat out wrong architechture, it always happens. I struggle more with accepting that my code is good enough and actually finish the project when I know I could improve it. Rather than the coupling issues themselves.

In my experience abstraction isn't about removing repetition, though it does work for it. I think its most important job is to remove dependances. As is in your example with the IntervalSaver. The actual saving might happen in a different library. And you don't want the main code to be dependent on all the possibilities of saving.

This video made me recall a book from Sandi Metz "Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby" where she wrote: "Code duplication is far cheaper (in terms of technical debt) than a wrong abstraction". Even if the book has been published years ago, I still find this sentence particulary true and relevant today. (I advice any curious programmer about OO to have a look at the book, even if you don't code in Ruby, that's my case, or even videos of her).

One mistake I commonly see is people try to abstract away pieces of code that only coincidentally repeat, but that isn't inherently equivalent. This is closely related to the single responsibility principle and separation of concerns. Code might be similar, but if they have different reasons to change, they do not belong under the same abstraction.

In my opinion abstraction isn't necessarily about code reusability. I would argue it's really about shared generics. The big trope that most programmers never learn is abstract to interface coupling. What I mean is defining an interface for an abstraction, and using interface methods within implemented abstract classes. By defining an interface for abstract classes, you can call upon non existent implementations (that the implementor later has to make). Think of it more as "hot swapping black box functionally".

In “bad” abstraction like you had shown with the Save classes, coupling can become a problem. The purpose of abstraction is to remove coupling where there could be quicker, easier ways to process and store data as well as provide ways to represent concepts in code. The byproduct of abstraction is removing repetition in data structures. In a case where you’re holding multiple blobs of data, and they all have similar (but not the same) shapes, and the way you interact with them is all the same, abstraction can actually remove coupling by making the handling of that data independent of what the data under the hood actually is. Interfaces are a good example of abstraction that does not care for what kind of data you are handling. In Java, if you want to get a list of objects, then using the abstracted “List” as a return type versus specifying an ArrayList or LinkedList makes the handling implementation agnostic to the underlying implementation, and making changes under the hood does not affect how the code is written in the handling of that data.

3:53 is a good example of polymorphism, a good abstraction that’s worth it would be a Save interface which both classes implement with their different way of saving, and you’d call the save method on the interface so you don’t have to add and “if” statement check the type and using a different implementation for each type

I want to say, I agree small codes don't need to be abstracted to interfaces and many inherited classes, such as a todo app don't need 10 interfaces with 20 classes just to achieve the goal. Most people do abstractions because it makes the code maintainable and easier to read with consistent naming conventions. Let's say in your example that you want to add saving as JSON. When someone decides to add this class. First off, you think, what if we need to add another file mode? such as CSV? pdf? HTML? or any other file modes. When you work in a team of people, and each of those implementations has to be done by other people, You are going to use an interface or a parent class, that has all the functionality, and the one who implements the new mode knows what the new file mode must implement and where to implement their code without breaking any changes. Everyone on the team had agreed that the interface has to have a function that returns the file name, another function to save the file, and so on... In summary, it's more about maintainability and working on one large codebase with more than 3 people. Because it will be hard to make communication as someone might use saveAsJSON, someone else might use save_as_json, and someone else goes for saveJsonFile. There will be no consistency and an interface gives the developer a contract to follow those rules without breaking any other codes with no communication, other developers understand how the new file mode must have a function name called save which returns in different file modes. You have to know when and where not to abstract, everything doesn't need abstraction but on a large scale, you have to abstract. Otherwise, you will make the entire codebase a place where no one likes to debug nor to add new functionality because there are so many duplications and you don't even know if those are really duplicate or if they may do a different task but with the exact same process that looks duplicated.

The "Rule of Three" is a good counterweight to "Don't Repeat Yourself" The idea is that you need at least three examples before you can decide what a good abstraction would be. If you try to write an abstraction too soon, you might abstract around concepts which turn out to be not very useful.

I think the major problem is that it seems the code wrote on the video favors inheritance over composition. Had the FileSaver class follow a bridge or strategy pattern, with the expected interface of the implementation component being something like "Save(fileName)", It would have worked better. Then, SaveToJSON would be one possible implementation, and the user would use FileSaver directly with either a default implementation or one of his choosing from the library we created. With dependency injection, he could create his own implementation to save files in any format he desires

I think you're talking about inheritance more than abstraction. Interfaces or abstract classes are a way to hide implementation details and actually decrease coupling. Inheritance / extending classes is what increases coupling.

I love this style of video where you walk us through various ways the code could be written and weigh their pros and cons. So many teachers either show only contrived examples, or just one big "correct" implementation. But your exploratory way of teaching is so helpful. Please keep making these in this style!

Good video, but there are other ways of abstraction then inheritance, you could use composition, and create a component based system. You also don't need to make classes for everything, you could just make a function to handle some specific parsing. Not thinking too much ahead and being pragmatic about the code you write (keep it simple), often makes the code easier to reason about and later refactor when it changes.

I usually try to avoid inheritance as much as possible and use composition instead. By embedding functionality you can still retain the meaning of "shared functionality" while separating the differences in separate classes. Of course only if it's worth it. The code you shown are a good example (more than two choices etc.).

I would suggest using composition over inheritance and also use more functional style programming. It’s much easier to have abstraction that way without locking yourself too much into coupling imo.

The base class for the filename does not create coupling to a filename, that was already there, if you didn't want the saver to save to a file its not the base class' fault. If anything, if when trying to abstract you think it creates a problem it means you already had a problem before. in case anyone didn't get it the problem is that XML has little to do with the file, in other words a saver needs a saving strategy like file or db and that strategy needs an optional format. say `new Saver(new DBSavingStrategy(db_handle))` or `new Saver(new FileSavingStrategy(file_handle, file_format))`.

There're times when coupling is good. Sometimes you _want_ to update something that changes all children classes simultaneously, instead of keeping track of which ones need the new code and manually changing it every time. If you forget, different entities that should have the same behavior start behaving differently. That said, I fully agree with everything else.

One consideration might be the skill level of other developers on your team. Delaying abstraction only until the benefits outweigh the coupling might mean you will encounter a huge mess the next time you need to work in this area of the code due to all the cumulative changes from the team. Setting up the abstraction early will encourage better design for future changes even if it may seem over engineered in the interim.

Don't abstract away code, abstract away the idea

To be honest, good abstractions aren't made because you want to limit duplicate code. Sometimes two processes, even though they are completely unrelated, do things the same way. That doesn't mean that they should share an abstraction. Sometimes things just look alike. The point of abstraction has never been, and will never be, limiting code duplication. It is all about sharing contextual abstractions. Hey I need to read an XML file to this format. That is translated to wanting to read a file that is in a format, and translating it to specific type X. That is an abstraction. Abstracting an account and a vault because they both have passswords isn't. Sometimes two or more things just look alike, but they aren't the same, even though they do things in the same way. Never abstract to limit duplication, abstract because you want to introduce flexibility to your system.

It's so easy to get this wrong and can be difficult to teach to someone else. You've done a great job at explaining it clearly and simply. Thank you.

As a math student and a programmer, I'd say doing abstractions is like doing factorization When you see a few terms, like x²+2x, you can factor it into x(x+2), which makes some further actions simpler because you have separated components to work with. However, this isn't always the case to do. For example, x²+1 isn't that good to be factored to (x+i)(x-i). This only made your original polynomial messier. This is so similar to code abstraction in the way that, you have to identify what's worth abstracting, and how it can help in further applications. Doing abstractions in already very simplified code only gives coupling, just like the x²+1 case I've mentioned. You can just call it not factorable (not abstractable) and peace out.

I just wanted to say that I really like your presentation style - working with examples from real use cases and showing how the code changes. That is very helpful and easy to follow, good job!

I think separating the ideas of abstraction and repetition helps a lot to choose good abstractions. Abstractions are supposed to guide your field of view to whatever is relevant to a given part of code. If one part of your code needs a means of saving a game, but doesn't need to know how it's done, then an abstraction for saving a game is beneficial. From the perspective of what code changes guarantee the need for other changes as a matter of being able to compile the code, an abstraction will always create coupling. But if the abstraction was a good choice, then from the perspective of what code changes are required for the code to continue being sensible, that coupling already existed. The abstraction just enforces it. A good choice of abstraction can also reduce coupling of both kinds from other parts of the code -- a Saver interface means that code that uses Savers can have just one variable and from its perspective one code path regardless of how many types of Saver exist. Lastly, a good choice of abstraction pushes coupling into islands of relevance where you can readily see what depends on what and why. Code that just needs a Saver and doesn't care which Saver still needs to get a Saver from somewhere, and that somewhere needs to contend with the different reasons one might be chosen over another and needs to contend with the needs of creating individual savers. That is coupling, but it's coupling that would've been diffused through the code base without the abstraction. I am struggling to make sense of your Saver example. I just cannot think of a situation where I would have multiple methods of saving something but would not have a part of the code that shouldn't care which method is employed. That is a situation that is impractical to accommodation without an abstraction. This situation also means the example of wanting to change the interface of just one does not make sense. If the code using savers does not need these additional features, then adding those features to any savers is unused code. If the code using savers does need these additional features, it probably needs them regardless of which kind of saver it is told to use, meaning that it needs to be added to all of the savers -- regardless of whether there is an actual in-language interface that enforces the change. I don't choose what I save and how I save based on the serialization format -- I choose the serialization format based on what I save and how I save. If a given serialization format or some other aspect of a saver isn't compatible with the new needs of the rest of the code, that saver is getting the boot.

Nice one! Completely agree with this! There is a difference between "repeating the same logic" and "by coincidence having the same logic currently". Spotting the difference can be hard but if you eliminate the apparent repetition of the latter you can find the code becoming less malleable . It can perversely be a source of bugs. Class A shares some logic with Class B. Class A doesn't behave correctly because there is a "bug" in the shared logic, however this "bug" is only truly a bug from the point of view of Class A, for class B it is perfectly correct. So you fix the bug, now you have broken Class B and its hard to know you have done that unless you check also Class B (and C, D...). Even with strong automated testing that newly introduced bug in Class B may go unnoticed. Also when shared logic is no longer compatible with all consumers there is a tendency for ugly `bool` values to appear in parameter lists and the code becomes harder to understand and even more bug prone.

As I mainly write firmware for microcontrollers in C, my main criterion for abstracting or not a piece of code is whether this will save on memory. Maintainability is then a close second (may be prioritized over memory if the amount of memory saved otherwise is small). Elegance that's not essential to maintainability comes third. Embedded programming is quite a fun field!

This is the situation at my work right now. Crazy balance between coupling and abstraction to deal with custom requirements growing. Every vendor has a different workflow and customers all want very unique things. It was once very coupled on the vendor side but we've broken it up a bit now.

I REALLY love this way of showing code. Explaining what are you doing while showing a speed up video of the changes.

I'm so glad I discovered this channel. I think I'm early, watched the two videos. I'd definitely love to see code architecture & structuring related videos.

The value in not repeating code is for the sake of maintainability. If you fix a bit of code that is shared across multiple functions you can be prone to miss all the spots that need updating. I typically dont let functions do more than "1 thing". I also am not doing OOP anymore. When a function does "1 thing" then its easy to generalize functions that can be generalized and functions that need to be hyper specific can be hyper specific

What do you think about abstraction in the terms of readability? What I mean is when the naming is on point (on top of your logic in abstracting things), you can read the "headlines" of the code and it divides into very understandable blocks and chunks and functionalities for human brain, and you quickly get a grasp of the big picture. With a lot of repetitive coding you're a bit in the jungle trying to see the forest from the undergrowth, you're whacking with a machete left and right trying to piece together the general picture of repetitive sections, you're creating the library of structure in your head.

I think an often overlooked benefit of abstraction is that, if done properly, it makes understanding code simpler.

I just watched you videos on naming variables and nesting code. I ran over to see what other videos you had and realized how new this channel is. Keep it up! This will be super useful to anyone new to programming. You bring out subtleties and nuances in coding that I myself have struggled with, but never given voice to. It's reassuring to hear that repeating code is ok, because in some cases it feels much more natural to do so, but I tend to feel some bizzare responsiblity to generalize when possible. Even though I'm writing code solo, for myself.

Abstraction *through inheritance* creates coupling. Once you mostly let go of class hierarchies and choose to program using data types and functions instead, most of these issues go away by themselves.

I usually find that good abstraction reduces coupling. I always aim to reduce coupling in my refactors and in my design. Having that as a goal works way better than anything else.

The problem in the example is really that the different savers have too much responsibility, namely both serializing the game state to a certain format, and also writing it to some kind of storage. This would make much more sense if you had an XMLSerializer and JSONSerializer that only did just that: take some input data and convert it to the correct format, then return it either as a string or a stream. Then you would have a GameManager that uses one type of serializer (DI) to facilitate the whole logic of "saveGame", and one or more storage connection classes (also DI), for example. In the end, you would end up with two interfaces: Serializer, Storage And several single purpose classes: GameManager, XMLSerializer, JSONSerializer, FileStorage, SqliteStorage, etc.

Great video that puts into words things I've felt for a while! I'm working on a project thats heavily abstracted on multiple levels. While there is less code overall it's very difficult to pick up, you get no sense of flow and it's a pain to debug. It feels like overly abstracted code makes it more and more difficult to stray from the beaten track and eventually you will have to.

This channel is great. I'm a hobby programmer and I find each of your videos very instructive and encouraging. Thank you. I'm looking forward to your next video!

I've never run into any system that suffers from overcoupling. Instead, I've often had to deal with systems that have copypasta code galore, dozens upon dozens of lines, and then when a feature needs changing, and it needs to happen everywhere, you gotta go and find all instances of this code and modify it X times, and test each one, because sometimes they have subtle differences and...

"identifying repetition and extracting it out" is honestly a junior/mid level understanding of abstraction. What you've described are the dangers of inheritance. The real power of abstraction is realized when you starting thinking about interfaces, layers, and domains. E.g. separation of concerns is achieved through abstraction ,and that decreases coupling.

Good looking Channel, short format, single subject, calm ton & relaxing background music, visual/ easy to understand/synthetic examples & explanations, this is probably gonna be a killer channel, glad to be here at the begining of the story, whish you the best :)

This is so insightful, it really brings together what I have been learning in my Software Design and Development course. I subbed and would like to see more videos like this

Could also be the other way around that due to poor abstraction you need to change code in a lot of places. I think the coupling thing is mostly an issue if you have poorly designed code that needs to be reworked. So the solution is, dont design your code poorly.

Interefaces are also important to consider. in this videos examples, you could have as many diofferent types of savers as you want, with one bit of logic to determine which to use, that all share a common interface, and then set up a way to check if its using interval at runtime and set the hook for that, for example. But, interface design is tricky, and you can end up with extra coupling where a certain method doesn't make sense for a particular implementation...

I don't think the example code showed shows that abstraction causes coupling. It shows that poorly written abstraction causes coupling. In the case of a file saver You can create abstract class FileSaver that holds not the filename but another abstract class DataStream, which resolves coupling problem

This video decribes me toooo well. After learning OOP and design pattern stuff I am always thinking about "how" I can abstract something, not "when". And that indeed screw things up a lot later.

Great video. I think we as developers need to often stop and ask ourselves, "am I over-engineering this by implementing it this way?" Instead of just assuming they're doing the best work because it's a common practice. Otherwise it often causes immense headache when another developer (or even the person who designed something) need to refactor or change something. Thank you for bringing attention to this overlooked topic!

Cant wait until he discovers Dependency Injection and Interfaces, then learn to use it properly... until then, he will rediscover whole OOP piece by piece

I just found your channel and love both videos. Really hope youre going on with this style

Great approach for the craft of programming! I really like the incorporation of the word "aesthetic" - I've found it myself that beautifully working code _is_ better. So, on the topic of abstraction - a broader generalization of what you've shown us, is that - if an abstraction is created to capture common ground from inside - implementation, tools, libraries, etc - it is usually unnecessary coupling. On the other hand - when abstraction tries to capture common view from outside - i.e. from those who _use_ the code, then it is usually OK, because it actually introduces a generalization, a true abstraction, and not just a code-duplication-removal.

What you're referring to here as abstraction seems to mostly just be inheritance. Abstraction deals more with making sense of raw data. EX: instead of remembering 3 numbers and an image, we group those together and call them a "GameObject," since it's easier to think about that way. Instead of calling 5 seemingly unrelated network functions, we wrap those up in an "UpdateServerState()," function because it makes more sense to read.

If you start using langauges with optional classes (python, C++) or without classes (go, rust) all this becoming even more interesting! Basicaly, in most cases you shouldn't make abstractions at all, it's needed in rare cases. Procedure decomposition much better in many common cases, and OOP (especial with classes) can help in some corner cases only.

First and foremost, I recently saw your videos, I love how you make them, I like the aesthetics of the edits and I like how you educate about these concepts, so kudos to you, I'm subscribed. Now, to me abstraction means more than just create classes and hide implementation details. Abstraction to me also means the usage of interfaces and the elimination of 'new' which ties your classes together (Tight coupling). Your FileSaver.Create method is still coupled to concretions like AWSSAver, SaveXML, etc. You could make the FileSaver where T is an IFile or a representation of something needed to save, that type T knows how to save itself because the "can do" contract is about implementing the Save method, after that you have different approaches, you can either use a factory pattern to make the concretion or better yet use a container that contains all the types something like services.Add() etc, and you can even change the abstraction on runtime, after that FileSaver can be much more, you can have an IEnumerable of files to save them, you can create a queue that saves them following a CRON or saves them using hangfire, etc, so you can use composition and have this IEnumerable as a property to do whatever you need. To me, the idea of abstraction should be there to talk about them as it is things in the real world (concepts or physical objects), if you can say them speaking using language then you can do it properly. Now, one rule of thumb I would use is... don't start with abstractions, start with the code all over a single piece of method and from there start the refactoring process, no duplicate code, separate things into methods, group behaviors and reasons to change into classes, etc., I don't think starting abstracting is a good idea, the main reason is because an implementation can change in the future because that Jira or whatever feature you are creating can change tomorrow.

I need to hug you! It's INSANE how much abstraction is going on. I am trying to learn Android OS API / programming. The examples I find are abstracting interfaces already designed in the API. Obfuscating the underlying "Source of Truth" in the logic. Programmers seem to have fallen so much in love with coding their own classes that they code data types over the top of datatypes just for the sake of loving their own coding style and not much more thought. Case in point, 20 years ago graduated as a computer engineer. Code was closer to hardware level. Now that's all abstracted. It's good we don't have to code the hardware interfaces but it's to the point the code for interfacing with hardware is MUCH more complicated than the hardware itself. Have we really gained anything in that process? I used to look at a datasheet and then write the code. What I needed was right in front of me to write my program. Now you interface with code to request access to hardware from the OS. In many instances that interfaces / code is scarcely documented... even if it is well documented you run into unknown dependencies and some degree of uncertinty in how the code interacts with the hardware. Many times there's tens of pages for a software interface (sometimes 100+ pages of documentation), when I used to deal with only a few page datasheet on the hardware resource. I don't think we've really made much progress to be honest with all this abstraction. There is definitely a balancing point and I feel we've far exceeded it to the point of too much code.

Been debating about abstraction in my both my React and API code. On one half, I enjoy knowing how each function's flow. On the other, I like writing less. I haven't really touched OOP recently, but I'm trying to avoid it as functional programming is something I prefer working on in the future.

Just found your channel, you've a new subscriber, really like the dedication to some topics related to clean code. Could you do a video about your take in OOP, second level inheritance, MVC and how what's been considered good practices has been changing through the years ?

Just found ur channel. Looks like ur doing absolutely great after only 2 weeks uptime! Subscribed!

good video. one question you can always ask yourself is: what is the blast radius of this change. having code duplication can be a good thing if you want to reduce the blast radius. "do i want to break y when i fix this for x". sometimes, instead of abstracting something away to a library, just leave it where it is until you really need to abstract it. "YAGNI" can be perfectly applied to pre mature abstractions ("you aint gonna need it")

Thinking about the data you have and what you need to do to it is more important than figuring out abstractions. Figure out what data you actually need to perform the work and write code to operate on that struct. This is the main idea behind data oriented design

For me it's all about defining abstractions that couple the code in a useful way. In other words if there's code that when it changes, by definition (not by convenience) must change in all places then it should be coupled and therefore abstracted.

Such an awesome thematic ! I hope your channel grows fast.

I've definitely seen both scenarios, as well as the one where over-abstracted code losses all meaning. That said I've also had the experience where accession reduces coupling, because dependencies drop off. This is especially true when using DI.

I would love a video about file system structure! I know its always going to be different between projects but I know there are common patters with /src, /docs, /bin, etc. Are there principles we should be following as to not get too nested or too shallow in our file structure?

i just love your animation style very simple and stylish

Your videos are so good. Can’t wait to see what you do next ❤

It works well when you program in a way where you only need to know about the interface. Saving by interface makes it way easier to transition to another save format later down the line. If done right, you can change one line of code and now your entire code base is using a different file format.

Great video! I tend to agree with you. Love the presentation. Looking forward to what you're planning on creating next.

Code is an art and a state of mind. I think that abstraction can't be learned, some feel it and some never, even with years of development. This is what differentiates an excellent programmer from others, an author of widely used libraries, frameworks, languages from others. Very good visual quality of the video, can't wait to see where this channel will take us.

You just coupled in my mind all the abstractions I did in the past by this abstract framework of abstraction-coupling. I will abstract no more in the same way, being now coupled to your ideas.

Subscribed immediately! Btw what theme are you using? it looks very clean.

I disagree with the save example, because you want to provide a unified way of saving and loading your game to an arbitrary file format. The other components are not responsible for knowing how the game is saved, just that it's 'savable' (so interface)

Cool stuff. I think one important thing to consider here is that abstraction doesn’t increase overall coupling per say. In your example, with no abstraction the coupling will now happen with the rest of your code interacting with your saver, and I don’t know if that’s a better scenario. Architecture flows so the whole breadth of how the system works matters. The goal is to lock your features for modification, so removing the XML saver for example won’t break logic in multiple other classes needlessly that were already tested. This is why the dependency rule is probably one of the most important rules to stick with. Your application should be split into layers, where there’s a saving top layer, for example. That layer should manage the bottom layers where you might have any variety of savers. That way, the rest of your code doesn’t care what happens when you save. It only knows to call a standard method on the top layer. That way, it truly doesn’t matter if you abstract your savers or not, because their lifecycle will be managed in a single place and any number of changes to the savers won’t result in changing code in unrelated features, which is often the way developers introduce bugs to existing functional features.

This came at a good time for me. I'm rewriting my game engine's code and I have felt the effects of coupling without really understanding what I was doing wrong.

another problem here is prevalent use of inheritance, since inheritance often couples things together much more tightly than a compositional approach. sometimes that can be the right thing to do, but oop definitely pushes it much more than is actually useful

If it was me and I wasn't limited by OOP abstractions, I would create an interface (trait) "Saver" that contains an associated type "Resource", a "constructor(Resource)" and a "save(GameState)" method. And then just pass a specific implementation of "Saver" to the Game object.

I learned to code on the job over the years, I don't have an academic CS background, and I've often noticed benefits of the academic training some of my colleagues received that make me kind of wish I had done a CS degree. That said, I have also notice a tendency in them to follow certain rules and conventions blindly, having been taught that that is the "right" way to do it. Everything you've said in this video just seems like common sense to me, it wouldn't occur to me that I "must" always avoid every scrap of repetition as a rule - repeting code is bad not just because it's "wrong", it's bad because I have to maintain more code, so the more I'm repeating the worse it is. But obviously, having the code defined separately in each class means I can change one without affecting the others. So I do whatever I feel is the best cost-benefit solution for my case. If you understand why these things are good or bad, you don't need formalised rules for when you should or shouldn't do something because it's common sense.

Thanks for sharing this! Perhaps slightly off topic, but one thing I'm (quickly) starting to discover is that even though I may have cleaner, compact and more readable code, it may not necessarily run faster. Being specific and taking the time to type out exactly what I want to happen when I can be specific may take me more time to do, but it performs faster than, for instance, looping for a solution. (This is Mike Action's thesis in a nutshell really.)

Go back in time- this is similar to (the same as?) using subroutines, functions, procedures. Whatever you call it, the smaller piece that you break out from the main code should do just one job, that way you don't have the coupling. If you need a procedure to do maybe 2 things, you break it into multiple procedures that each just do one thing. Now the coupling is gone.

Abstraction doesn't increase coupling when used properly. Abstraction hides complex ideas behind simpler ones. There is nothing simpler about inheriting from a FileSaver class if the only thing you share is the filename. This poorly chosen example feels like too much of a straw-man and I think you're doing people a disservice by confusing an example of bad object-oriented design with the idea of abstraction, which has no inherent relation to OOP.

The 3b1b of code :)

Avoiding repetition is rule of thumb that should help us to make the code easier to maintain. If using a bit of duplicate code is in the end increasing the maintainablility, because we don't have to use abstraction, that is a good thing.

I really appreciate the thought that abstraction and coupling are opposing forces. I've never considered it from that perspective and I think this will help me when designing future systems.

You got it wrong: you tried to implement 2 abstractions in 1. The first is what we call serialization. And the second just the transportation (file, network). The way to do the first is by using the Visitor Pattern. So you then have a json serializer and a xml serializer. The object to serialize should then implement the serializable interface (which can call save methods of the given serializer, that construct is called "double dispatch"). Use the Visitor Pattern in cases where 1: you have hierarchical data(structure) and 2: want to (depency) inject behaviour into the object.

No offense, just curious, but do you have any experience with writing code for actual companies?

Wait is this really your second video? It's excellent quality, subscribed!

Most of my time in companies I worked for goes into convincing engineers not always repeating is bad! If you have only 2 cases for your found pattern, it doesn’t mean you need to create shared code! If you don’t have a complete insight over your problem or future requirements do not abstract!! Thank you for the video, The idea is to grow together and then we can do great things.

I honestly can't tell if this is a joke video or it was simply meant to bait people (consider me baited), with the video starting with "For every bit of abstraction you add, you've added more coupling". No, abstraction means literally the exact opposite. If your abstractions are making your code more coupled then you need to learn some better design patterns and stop using so much inheritance.

The way I usually go about this is, by default, having different scripts with duplicate code. The moment I try to do something with those scripts in which an abstraction could help me do it faster, I stop whatever I am doing, and create that abstraction. There is a little downside to this which is that you have to create all the systems from the beginning and not really overdevelop one side of the app without making sure the rest is in a basic state and interconnected. This way, you can catch these potential abstraction classes early and you don't have to change a lot of things. I don't see this working for bigger applications, thought. Actually, today, I had to do this in my tower defence game. I was creating one script for all the turrets, another script for all the barracks and another script for all the farms. Then I had to create a very basic UI and realized if I had a building parent class that contains the name, description and cost of every building, I could save me some time developing it their UI. We will see if in a year, I regret this decision, but for now it does feel great to find these little shortcuts.

This is very solid how you described abstraction as a tradeoff with coupling. Its reinforced what I was wondering as to, do you really create an interface or abstraction where your going to use it for only possibly two classes and without over engineering future edge cases and try to plan for every possible scenario.

Please dont stop creating content. Your videos have amazing value

You have the point of the save(GameState) interface abstraction backwards, the point of that abstraction is to force the coupling between the rest of the game and the specific serialization method to nothing, because you communicate through the interface instead of directly with the SaveJson or SaveXML class. You then have dependency injection to swap out or add whatever serialization implementation later with a guarantee that you won't have to decouple anything from the previous or edit any existing code beyond adding the class to a list. It doesnt make sense to call having to have a function that's already present in the concrete classes increased coupling, if anything it's less coupling because without the interface the game or factory must know the specific interface of all concrete classes instead of just one uniform interface. Also, your factory design actually increases coupling because you now have to extend an enum, add some config data, change the caller to refer to that enum case, then add your specific enum case into the switch statement to call a specific concrete function that's uniform across all classes. Again, it's less coupling for the factory to have a serialization interface because there would only be one function to couple with. But in reality the factory would be superfluous with an interface because it just increases complexity for no gain. So all you've done is taken the small coupling that would've constrained your concrete serialization classes and spread it across your entire codebase instead. The fact that you ended up adding the abstraction back for the timer proves that there is less coupling with an interface. I do agree that abstractions or indirection is not the answer to every problem but this was a really poor example.

Thanks for the video and for bringing up this topic, which I think is massively overlooked in general. In school and the early years of programming one often get the impression that "Code duplication is bad, must do abstraction" without ever thinking about coupling issues and about creating unnessecary complexity in the system. Sure, code duplication might be bad, but that doesn't mean more abstraction is the solution, especially if the abstraction means more inheritance structures in some object oriented language. I have often been swearing at old code that cannot be upgraded or modified just because the thing I want to modify is stuck in some strange structure with a lot of dependencies/couplings. Some contained free utility functions doing one thing and doing exactly what it is said to do without any couplings to other code is often a better alternative to more abstractrion. In that way one can avoid code duplication without increasing the couplings. Coupling really is an enemy to all upgrades of the code. Everyone will become more and more hestiant to do any changes since it might break something. In that way they whole codebase has a big risk of becoming obsolute and out of date.

In the real world I would suggest to use dependency injection for the file saver. In this case you have no coupling and can write unit tests more easily.

Abstraction can also be used to reduce coupling with dependencies, but i totally agree with you when you are designing your "business/game" logic it can increasing coupling which can be dangerous without any actual benefits. One other point you didnt mention is with generic purpose classes, if not designed/used correctly it can make the code harder to understand for what use cases it is used for. A simple exemple i can think of is using the same generic entity with a 'type' property to handle differents use cases, instead of having one entity for each, i see this a lot, and it create its own lots of problems ( storage and data manipulation ), while forcing you to use switch statement in your code base which is not a good idea for maintainable code.

I'm still learning, however, here is my opinion: the problem with saveWhatEver isn't the abstraction itself, but a design problem related to the responsibilities. The coupling derives from mixing two responsibilities in one class. You have two different actions, converting an object into a JSON/XML representation and saving a file.

Imo, in the example of the save method it brings value, as defining a common interface means that both classes can be used interchangeably in the main code, thus actually reducing coupling.

my problem with abstraction is that a LOT of the times it's done very poorly in a way that makes it an obstacle in the code/program rather than a tool. I've seen a lot of programmers (juniors AND seniors) fetishize and abuse interfaces while using "separation of concerns" and "cLeAn CoDe" as the end all be all arguments , like do you really need an IManager that inherits ISystem that manages ICustomers (which are also ICurrencyHolder btw) which contains ICurrency just to say that "a customer can have x amount of money?". I've seen "IMovable" and "IRotatable" in a codebase of a game just because "well some objects like doors only rotate, and some objects like bullets on move , sooo yeah gotta make sure EVERYBODY knows that now" ... Abstraction is only good when you know how to do it correctly and it serves a valid and concrete purpose , if not then it's a just hurdle to go through just because the writer of the code "felt like it"

Hi, this is a very interesting topic with a really short conclusion in my opinion. I see trading between abstraction and coupling as an oversimplification. There are multiple ways of fighting coupling and code repetition: abstraction as in inheritance, better abstraction with interfaces, composition, bridges, callables/runnables/callbacks/closures, proxies, event driven programming, etc.