In a project I'm working on at home, I started off with an extremely naive implementation, the …

… In a project I'm working on at home, I started off with an extremely naive implementation, the single file of functions described above, and when the messiness became unbearable, I started building object-oriented abstractions to make sense of it all. But the structure of those abstractions was discovered while making the mess - if I'd tried to build that at the start, I'd have built the wrong thing. I'm very fortunate in that in both my day job and my recreational programming, I'm the only person working on that particular codebase at the time. (At work, I develop what are basically plugins for the framework-type-thing that's our main product.) Consequently, I have the freedom to make a mess and clean it up once I've muddled about in the solution space to discover what's going to work best, and so most of the solutions in the blog post are rather unnecessary for me. In the end, two months of work on my home project was thrown away and rewritten, which I could never have got away with at my job, but the project is all the better for it.