A Philosophy of Software Design

by John Ousterhout

In deciding what matters, there are two kinds of mistakes you can make. The first mistake is to treat too many things as important. When this happens, unimportant things clutter up the design, adding complexity and increasing cognitive load. One example is methods with arguments that are irrelevant to most callers. Another example is the Java I/O interface discussed on page 26: it forced developers to be aware of the distinction between buffered and unbuffered I/O, even though this distinction is almost never important (developers almost always want buffering and don’t want to waste time asking for it explicitly). Shallow classes are often the result of treating too many things as important.

What matters