Agreed. This is -- or should be -- called "premature refactoring."

rubbingalcohol · on Feb 8, 2013

I don't even think it's always premature refactoring. Sometimes it is just stupid refactoring.

A correlating result to stupid refactoring is the existence of over-generalized functions that try to do so much that they need an absolute crap-ton of parameters passed in and still end up locking you down to a limited set of functionality. Adobe's ColdFusion scripting language (anyone remember that) used to have functions that would automatically generate huge and specific pieces of client-side JavaScript functionality. Stuff to the effect of:

  cfCreateShoppingCartWithPopupSummaryWhenUserHoversOverLink({
    supportsPaypal: true,
    dontShowLinkOnCategoryPage: true,
    doShowLinkOnProducePage: false, ...},
    'myShoppingCartElement',
    ...)

Okay maybe I'm embellishing a little bit. But the end result was loading hundreds of kilobytes of proprietary JavaScript libraries to support these weird built-in functions that would create very specific bits of client-side functionality that would then need a billion parameters passed in to allow remotely useful customization. Maybe it would have been better to just learn JavaScript instead of being locked in this way.