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Comment by Philip-J-Fry

"What if it changes?" is a reasonable question to ask. But every time you do you are walking a tightrope. My rule of thumb is that we look at what is in use TODAY, and then write a decent abstraction around that. If something is used once, ignore any abstractions. If it's used twice, just copy it, it's better. If it's used 3 or more times, look at writing an abstraction that suits us TODAY not for the future. Bonus points if the abstraction allows us to extend easily in the future, but nothing should be justified with a "what if".

The reason a lot of Java or C# code is written with all these abstractions is because it aids unit testing. But I've come to love just doing integration testing. I still use unit testing to test complex logic, but things like "does this struct mapper work correctly" are ignored, we'll find out from our integration tests. If our integration tests work, we've fulfilled our part of the contract, that's all we care about. Focus on writing them and making them fast and easy to run. It's virtually no different to unit tests but just 10x easier to maintain.

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