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Table Of Contents
Polished Ruby Programming - Second Edition
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Removing features sounds like a bad thing for less experienced programmers, but it is probably one of the happiest moments for more experienced programmers. One important thing to understand is that while most users think of features as assets, if you are maintaining a library, features are best thought of as liabilities, because every feature has a maintenance cost. When you add a new feature to a library you maintain, you are increasing your future maintenance burden. By removing a feature in a library that you maintain, you are ridding yourself of a liability. This is one reason why removing features is one of the happiest moments for experienced programmers.
Obviously, a library with no features is worthless, so an important quality for a library is that the features it contains are useful, with the benefit of each feature exceeding its maintenance cost. However, as foresight is an uncommon gift, it is often not possible when adding a feature to know whether...
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