I don't think it's off-topic at all. The ideal this kind of thing is trying to achieve is separation of concern. One developer or team or even entire organization is writing things like serializers for specific kinds of file formats or other sources of persisted data like databases and environment variables or things like the Java Springboot externalized config. Another organization is just trying to create an application that requires configuration. They don't necessarily want to have to worry too much about where it comes from. Especially in places that strictly separate development and operations, they'll probably have no say anyway and it'll change over time and they're not gonna want to change their own code when it does.
You can analogize this to non-software use cases. I've got phillips head and flathead screwdrivers and ideally don't want to have to worry about the specific qualities of a particular kind of screw when selecting one. It either has one slot on the head or two. That's the interface to the screw and it should be the only thing I have to worry about when selecting a screwdriver.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing can balloon out of control, and in the worst kinds of "enterprise" Java shops I was involved in deep into my past, where concrete classes were injected at runtime by xml file loaded into the framework, it was literally impossible to tell what code was going to do simply by reading it, because it is impossible to know what is being injected at runtime except by inspecting it during runtime. It's a pretty frustrating experience when reading an entire code base doesn't tell you what the code actually does.
> it was literally impossible to tell what code was going to do simply by reading it, because it is impossible to know what is being injected at runtime except by inspecting it during runtime. It's a pretty frustrating experience when reading an entire code base doesn't tell you what the code actually does.
I've worked in "legacy" nodejs code since node 0.x. Glad to hear that there might be hope of codebases that don't have this problem. I thought typescript would help, but I've learned that fancy generics can ensure that it's still quite possible to have no idea what something will actually do in a real world environment, you'll just have a lot more cognitive overhead in wondering about it.
To be clear, I love ts and fancy generics that try to impose a Haskell-like determinacy on js Object structure with exclusivity and exception guarantees and all the rest; I just also hate it/them, at the same time.
You can analogize this to non-software use cases. I've got phillips head and flathead screwdrivers and ideally don't want to have to worry about the specific qualities of a particular kind of screw when selecting one. It either has one slot on the head or two. That's the interface to the screw and it should be the only thing I have to worry about when selecting a screwdriver.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing can balloon out of control, and in the worst kinds of "enterprise" Java shops I was involved in deep into my past, where concrete classes were injected at runtime by xml file loaded into the framework, it was literally impossible to tell what code was going to do simply by reading it, because it is impossible to know what is being injected at runtime except by inspecting it during runtime. It's a pretty frustrating experience when reading an entire code base doesn't tell you what the code actually does.