Unmasking yet another useless abstract class instead of the real function

Description

Two - panel Scooby-Doo unmasking meme: In the top frame, Fred reaches to pull a hood from a tied-up villain. White overlay text on the hooded figure reads “The function I was looking for,” while yellow subtitle text below Fred says “Let’s see who this really is.” In the bottom frame the mask is removed; the revealed figure still sits bound, and new white overlay text says “Another crappy abstract.” The joke highlights the developer frustration of tracing through deep inheritance or interface layers - expecting a concrete implementation but discovering yet another abstract class/method. It satirizes excessive abstraction, code smell proliferation, and the technical debt that accumulates when design patterns are applied without restraint

Common Tags

CodeQuality DeveloperHumor CodeSmells TechnicalDebt CodebaseComplexity OverEngineering RefactoringNeeded DesignPattern

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Tracing a prod bug here is pure Scooby-Doo: rip off AbstractBaseService, find AbstractCoreService, unmask again - still abstract; the only concrete thing left is my existential dread

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Tracing a prod bug here is pure Scooby-Doo: rip off AbstractBaseService, find AbstractCoreService, unmask again - still abstract; the only concrete thing left is my existential dread
Anonymous

After 15 years in the industry, you realize the real design pattern is AbstractFactoryFactoryBean implementing IAbstractFactoryFactory<T> where T extends AbstractBase<? super AbstractInterface> - and somewhere, deep in the inheritance tree, there's a single concrete class with three lines of actual business logic
Anonymous

Every senior engineer has experienced this moment: you're debugging production at 2 AM, desperately searching for the actual implementation of a critical function, only to discover it's hidden behind seven layers of AbstractFactoryProviderBuilderInterface wrappers. The real villain isn't the bug - it's the architect who thought 'just one more abstraction layer' would make the codebase more maintainable. Spoiler: it didn't
Anonymous

You know it’s enterprise code when Cmd+Click becomes a DFS through interfaces, factories, and adapters - ending at an abstract doWork() with a TODO
Anonymous

Peel back one abstraction layer expecting concrete bliss, uncover another factory churning out interfaces - classic enterprise SOLID gone fractal
Anonymous

Followed the DI graph through five AbstractAdapterFactoryProviders; the “function” unmasks as a single null check
@hafijuldev 1y

linux kernel code
@SCP6789 1y

port adapter pattern with single adapter for entire codebase
扇子 1y

is it like that in every major codebase? very confusing
1. @RiedleroD 1y
  
  idk, I try not to do this in my code
  
  @SamsonovAnton 1y
  
  You mean you don't usually have ApplicationFactory, nor even ErrorHandlingStrategy? 🤓
  
  @RiedleroD 1y
  
  highest-level abstractions you will find me using is gonna be my enum polyfill for php<8.0
  
  @callofvoid0 1y
  
  If there is only one application then why would you have an application factory
  
  @callofvoid0 1y
  
  and why would there be any strategy for an error it either will be ignored , will throw an exception, try an alternative or will crash the whole app
  
  @SamsonovAnton 1y
  
  That's the whole point of over-abstraction for the sake of abstraction — to write one's specific application as if it was a generic framework! 🤓
  
  @azizhakberdiev 1y
  
  Kinda hard to define a specific point where you should stop abstracting. You want high level logic just be hardcoded but at the same time care about dlc