How extensible should code actually be?

Posted by griegs on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by griegs
Published on 2010-05-24T10:57:18Z Indexed on 2010/05/24 11:01 UTC
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subjective

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Extensibility

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good-design

I've just started a new job and one of the things my new boss talked to me about was code longevity.

I've always coded to make my code infinently extensible and adaptable. I figured that if someone was going to change my code in the future then it should be easy to do.

But I never really had a clear idea on how far into the future that should be.

So my new boss told me not to bother coding for anything more that 3 years into the future and his reasoning was that technology changes, programs expire etc.

At first I was kinda taken aback and thought he was a whack job but the longer I think about it the more I'm warming to the concept.

Does anyone else have an opinion on how far into the future you should code to?

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