Coupling

• manufactured concern to protect developers (or appease managers) who are afraid of refactoring and would rather maintain a pile of hacks
  • seems particularly prevalent in the web ecosystem but also leaking outside of it
• so-called coupling is actually a good thing, as everything can automatically benefit from improvements in the shared code
  • we do not need to predict the future if it's easy to make changes to the codebase, which should be the case anyway
• when shared code does not support your use case, change it so that it does
  • unit tests should be in place to ensure existing use cases remain supported
  • tangled conditional logic, as ever, can be avoided via polymorphism
• there is always the option of inlining shared code that isn't fit for purpose