Introduction to Part 1
By the time you have written your abstraction layer, you have essentially written your own framework. Chances are, you are not a good framework writer, and it’s going to suck, and you are going to realize that one or two versions down the road and re-write it. © RedMonk in Java’s Fear of Commitment.
While there is a lot written on how difficult it is to write a good abstraction layer, there is very little advice on how to avoid the worst evil of the abstraction layer: obfuscation. As I scoured the internet looking for any discussion on this topic, my search results were a lot more sparse than I was expecting. There is a very succinct blog entry by Rhett Maxwell that turned up in my results that summarizes some of what I’d like to say in a single sentence: Most of the books out there that teach OO design talk about Abstraction, but they do not warn about Obfuscation at all. Its a shame.
And to those of you wondering why this type of obfuscation is a problem, let me clear it up. Obfuscation at its most harmless simply confuses people. Obfuscation at its worst makes people stupid. When the most brilliant programmer can no longer figure out how to get from point A to B, even though they are right next to each other, all their genius is useless.
JavaScript is incredibly susceptible to becoming accidentally obfuscated. In the next month or so, I want to go over various common methods of abstraction that I have seen widely used in JavaScript and discuss how and why they can lead to obfuscation.
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