I originally wrote the following for my Chainline Newsletter , but I continue to get tweets about this idea, so I'm re-publishing the article here on my blog. This version has been lightly edited.

I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." My RailsConf 2014 " all the little things " talk included a section where I asserted :

duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction

And in the summary, I went on to advise :

prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction

This small section of a much bigger talk invoked a surprisingly strong reaction. A few folks suggested that I had lost my mind, but many more expressed sentiments along the lines of:

This, a million times this! " @BonzoESC : "Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction" @sandimetz @rbonales pic.twitter.com/3qMI0waqWb "

— 41 shades of blue (@pims) March 7, 2014

The strength of the reaction made me realize just how widespread and intractable the "wrong abstraction" problem is.…