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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?
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The term is generally used where softcoding becomes an anti-pattern. Abstracting too many values and features can introduce more complexity and maintenance issues than would be experienced with changing the code when required. Softcoding, in this sense, was featured in an article on The Daily WTF.
In software, anti-pattern is a term that describes how NOT to solve recurring problems in your code. Anti-patterns are considered bad software design, and are usually ineffective or obscure fixes.
Softcoding is a computer coding term that refers to obtaining a value or function from some external resource, such as text files, INI files, preprocessor macros, external constants, configuration files, command-line arguments, databases, user input, HTTP server responses.
Soft-coding: it is process of inserting values from external source into computer program. like insert values through keyboard, command line interface. Soft-coding considered as good programming practice because developers can easily modify programs. Hard-coding.
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());
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