jargon

Architecture & practice·Design, structure and tradeoffs

you followed the call through four interfaces to find the one line that actually does the work.

Indirection

Also calledlayer of indirection

Putting something in between two parts so they refer to each other by name rather than directly. It is the standard move for buying flexibility — you can swap either side — and it is the standard move for making a codebase unreadable, because every hop is a thing the reader has to hold. The judgement is whether the flexibility is one you will use: indirection added for a second implementation that never arrives is pure cost.

Commonly confused with