What is soft coding? (Anti-pattern)

Question

I found the Wikipedia entry on the soft coding anti-pattern terse and confusing. So what is soft coding? In what settings is it a bad practice (anti-pattern)? Also, when could it be considered beneficial, and if so, how should it be implemented?

Answer 1

Short answer: Going to extremes to avoid Hard Coding and ending up with some monster convoluted abstraction layer to maintain that is worse than if the hard coded values had been there from the start. i.e. over engineering.

Like:

SpecialFileClass file = new SpecialFileClass( 200 ); // hard coded

SpecialFileClass file = new SpecialFileClass( DBConfig.Start().GetConnection().LookupValue("MaxBufferSizeOfSpecialFile").GetValue());

Answer 2

Ola, a good example of a real project that has the concept of softcoding built in to it is the Django project. Their settings.py file abstracts certain data settings so that you can make the changes there instead of embedding them within your code. You can also add values to that file if necessary and use them where necessary.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/settings/

Example:

This could be a snippet from the settings.py file:

num_rows = 20

Then within one of your files you could access that value:

from django.conf import settings
...

for x in xrange(settings.num_rows):
   ...

Answer 3

The main point of the Daily WTF article on soft coding is that because of premature optimization and fear a system that is very well defined and there is no duplicated knowledge is altered and becomes more complex without any need.

The main thing that you should keep in mind is if your changes actually improve your system and avoid to lightly label something as anti-pattern and avoid it by all means. Configuring your system and avoiding hardcoding is a simple cure for duplicated knowledge in your system (see point 11 : "DRY Don't Repeat Yourself" in The Pragmatic Programmer Quick Reference Guide) This is the driving need behind the suggestion of avoiding hardcoding. I.e. there should be ideally only one place in you system (that would be code or configuration) that should be altered if you have to change something as simple as an error message.

Answer 4

The ultimate in softcoding:

const float pi = 3.1415; // Don't want to hardcode this everywhere in case we ever need to ship to Indiana.