yanacuti1121 OBEY A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
When to use
Use when the main risk is accidental complexity, shallow abstractions, leaky interfaces, or tactical patches.
Primary bias to correct
Working code, small pieces, and familiar wrappers are not automatically simple.
Decision rules
- Optimize for lower cognitive load and local understandability, not shorter files, familiar patterns, fewer lines, or clever compactness.
- Prefer deep modules; reject wrappers, layers, helpers, facades, and split-outs that do not hide real complexity.
- Hide volatile decisions, representations, storage, protocol facts, workflow bookkeeping, and messy edge handling in one owning module.
- Make interfaces caller-centered and semantic; avoid staged APIs, flags, setup sequences, and mechanism leakage when the module can provide the right operation.
- If a change feels awkward or spreads widely, improve ownership and abstraction instead of adding tactical special cases.
- Combine or split by total complexity: keep shared knowledge together and split only at independently understandable boundaries.
- Treat names and comments as design signals: precise abstraction names, explicit contracts, and no comments that compensate for bad decomposition.
- Add complexity for performance, trends, patterns, frameworks, tests, or exception handling only when evidence or caller needs justify it.
Trigger rules
- When adding a helper, layer, option, callback, pattern, or abstraction, prove it removes complexity for callers.
- When an API requires sequencing, representation, storage, transport, caching, protocol, or file-format knowledge, redesign the boundary.
- When naming is hard, comments get long, or reviewers are surprised, treat it as design evidence.
- When one change spreads widely, look for duplicated knowledge, hidden dependencies, temporal coupling, or the wrong owner.
- When optimizing or adding exception paths, keep the common path simple and require evidence or a stronger invariant.
Final checklist
- Fewer concepts to hold?
- More complexity hidden below the right boundary?
- Fewer special cases, knobs, leaks, and call-order traps?
- Better names, contracts, ownership, and evidence for any added complexity?