And then those methods grow and grow, or stop making sense, or start meaning something else, and you would have to go through the same abstract-deprecate-remove again. Rinse and repeat and if you do this regularly enough you have web development where you get your feet swept from under you every couple of years.
It’s a bit of a pick your poison situation, for me the backwards compatibility path is the right call here though.
I know where you’re coming from here. All I can say is there is something else wrong in this case and this is how it’s being expressed. I’ve seen it several times myself and sometimes no amount of good coding can fix bad architecture.
But I will say that if the twenty use cases all grow to the point of needing their own abstraction, I think you’d be damn glad there was at least a point of separation instead of having to maintain all possible permutations in a single method signature.
And then those methods grow and grow, or stop making sense, or start meaning something else, and you would have to go through the same abstract-deprecate-remove again. Rinse and repeat and if you do this regularly enough you have web development where you get your feet swept from under you every couple of years.
It’s a bit of a pick your poison situation, for me the backwards compatibility path is the right call here though.
I know where you’re coming from here. All I can say is there is something else wrong in this case and this is how it’s being expressed. I’ve seen it several times myself and sometimes no amount of good coding can fix bad architecture.
But I will say that if the twenty use cases all grow to the point of needing their own abstraction, I think you’d be damn glad there was at least a point of separation instead of having to maintain all possible permutations in a single method signature.