Abstraction is expensive
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Abstraction is expensive
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Re: Abstraction is expensive
#2This sounds like an application risk-aversion/-seeking that Kahneman highlights in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Specifically... each of these individual decisions (wrt to abstraction, in this context) was made to locally optimize (speed, simplicity, etc) some issue or other
But when taken in gestalt, they're overall not only not optimal, but downright bad
Most of those decisions are made by people far to close to a tiny portion of the problem to understand the implications of their choices
Alternatively, it's an application of the blind mice finding an elephant story: yes, it's like a rope, a fan, a tree, a hose, and on and on
But it's none of those, it's an elephant
Re: Abstraction is expensive
#3This sounds like an application risk-aversion/-seeking that Kahneman highlights in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Specifically... each of these individual decisions (wrt to abstraction, in this context) was made to locally optimize (speed, simplicity, etc) some issue or other But when taken in gestalt, they're overall not only not optimal, but downright bad Most of those decisions are made by people far to close to a tiny…
The title needs work too. People will undoubtedly assume that reducing abstraction will make things cheaper.
Re: Abstraction is expensive
#4This sounds like an application risk-aversion/-seeking that Kahneman highlights in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Specifically... each of these individual decisions (wrt to abstraction, in this context) was made to locally optimize (speed, simplicity, etc) some issue or other But when taken in gestalt, they're overall not only not optimal, but downright bad Most of those decisions are made by people far to close to a tiny…
The title needs work too. People will undoubtedly assume that reducing abstraction will make things cheaper.
Indeed.
Re: Abstraction is expensive
#5Lack of abstraction is also expensive: try writing something large in assembly.
I'd say that lack of a language / system of notions adequate to the subject area is expensive. The desire to describe things in a way that's efficient for a particular class of problems leads to invention of various frameworks. Say, Rails makes you hugely productive at solving a particular type of problems (see [Shopify]), though it's less than helpful if you try to apply it to unfitting problems (see [Twitter]).
[Shopify]: https://tomaszs2.medium.com/how-shopify-handled-1-27-million... (Sorry for a Medium link)
[Twitter]: https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/08/twitter_epic_traffic_...
Re: Abstraction is expensive
#6The problem is that application performance doesn't only depend on the thing you want to do, but also depends on the low level implementation details and workload, which the programmer may not fully understand or in control of. Some operation may be optimal when executed alone but exists better alternative for batch processing. Some programs may be optimized for throughput but is really bad for low latency application. The designer have to consider these when designing their system, and compilers/library writers can't help much except write a more comprehensive documentation which the programmer will probably not read :).
I think abstraction guides implementation, so it is very beneficial to think about what will be the bottleneck in the application, and if a certain abstraction will hinder the performance or prohibit future optimization. And although a low level abstraction can in theory allow for better performance if the programmer spend enough time to optimize for it, they often won't and a simpler interface (with sane implementation and perhaps escape hatches for performance tuning) may allow for better performance with much less effort.
Re: Abstraction is expensive
#7One of my favorite quotes about software engineering, sorry not sure who to attribute it to:
"First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you're ready to engineer"
Re: Abstraction is expensive
#8Lack of abstraction is also expensive: try writing something large in assembly. I'd say that lack of a language / system of notions adequate to the subject area is expensive. The desire to describe things in a way that's efficient for a particular class of problems leads to invention of various frameworks. Say, Rails makes you hugely productive at solving a particular type of problems (see [Shopify]), though it's les…
The headline is sort of misleading. It is (appropriately) primarily about inappropriate abstractions. As you say, some abstractions are unavoidable. Even assembly language is an abstraction.
Re: Abstraction is expensive
#9Lack of abstraction is also expensive: try writing something large in assembly. I'd say that lack of a language / system of notions adequate to the subject area is expensive. The desire to describe things in a way that's efficient for a particular class of problems leads to invention of various frameworks. Say, Rails makes you hugely productive at solving a particular type of problems (see [Shopify]), though it's les…
The headline is sort of misleading. It is (appropriately) primarily about inappropriate abstractions. As you say, some abstractions are unavoidable. Even assembly language is an abstraction.
That's why real programmers write binary object code directly.
Re: Abstraction is expensive
#10This sounds like an application risk-aversion/-seeking that Kahneman highlights in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Specifically... each of these individual decisions (wrt to abstraction, in this context) was made to locally optimize (speed, simplicity, etc) some issue or other But when taken in gestalt, they're overall not only not optimal, but downright bad Most of those decisions are made by people far to close to a tiny…
The title needs work too. People will undoubtedly assume that reducing abstraction will make things cheaper.
Eh, some people might do that, but, really, titles like that beg you to read the article (or at least it's why I read it). The article absolutely does not say anything like "reducing abstraction will make things cheaper".