What is soft coding? (Anti-pattern)

Question

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 cou

Answer 1

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());