title: Hard coding vs Generic coding : Where to draw the line?
body: <p>I'm not exactly sure how to word this but  I'll try.  </p>
  
  <p>Suppose you have some settings in some piece of your program where your 80% sure you won't ever have to modify again.  How do you know where to draw the line on changeable code?  You know that taking the settings all the way to a user defined XML file is overkill.  However, you also know that there is a slight 20% chance that these settings may need to be changed later on so coding it at the place where the rubber meets the road isn't optimal either.  </p>
  
  <p>I guess what I'm trying to ask is, how far up the abstraction tree should you allow your program to be easily changeable?  </p>
  
  <p>One of many examples is writing the HTML code for a website manually vs having the program automatically generating it.  Writing the HTML code directly doesn't take too much time.  Writing the a program to automatically generate the HTML code takes much longer.  </p>