One time, I had to work on some guy’s web-based scheduling application that he wrote in Perl. I’m something of a Perl guru (although experiences with other peoples’ Perl code have led me to avoid the language now), but wow. There were like ten layers of abstraction in the stupid thing, so it took me days to figure out where the real work was being done. The dude who wrote it was an eccentric genius, but his program was horribly over-engineered to the point of being unmaintainable. It felt like it was written so that if you wanted to, you could set it up to work on a completely different (non-web) interface, which was completely outside of the program’s design requirements.

So yeah, Baklava code. Excellent analogy.

And to answer my own silly question: How about Mexican food. Seven basic ingredients served up in a multitude of different ways depending on the dish to be served (or task to be coded).