We have used too many levels of abstractions
unixsheikh.com
We have used too many levels of abstractions
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Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#2this is the kind of thing you say during an interview, get rejected and then wonder if you just experienced ageism instead of any introspection about your own rant
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#3this is the kind of thing you say during an interview, get rejected and then wonder if you just experienced ageism instead of any introspection about your own rant
A charitable interpretation of the article is of course a balance is what actually matters. It is good, on some level, that abstractions free up developers or whoever to focus on the business instead of just tiny little details. Their example, however, proves you need escape hatches sometimes, and you need to have a mind for the details at times, and right now the balance is far in the "abstract everything" direction which has its own issues.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#4this is the kind of thing you say during an interview, get rejected and then wonder if you just experienced ageism instead of any introspection about your own rant
Can you elaborate on that? What kind of introspection do you think the author is missing?
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#5[dead]
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#6I feel like if I was alive and working 60 years ago I would have been saying the same thing about mechanics, construction, and analog electronics. But really it doesn't matter for most jobs. Knowing how things work underneath is needed if you are forming your own business and products from the ground up, it is only slightly useful if you are working for somebody else, and as time goes on what monetary value there is left in that knowledge will evaporate to nothing for 98% of workers.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#7I guess it's somewhat apt for a rant against abstraction to hyperlink…
> Some students today apparently don't even know what files and folders are
…to a slashdot thread that links to a PC Gamer article that rephrases and links to a Verge article that links to Stack Exchange questions.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#8I support the notion of this post. In the last 6 years I’ve mostly been busy removing layers of abstraction in order to uncover the set of tools which is a good balance for me.
In example, replaced clojurescript with Javascript and then eventually Typescript.
Replaced Clojure with Java.
Replaced docker with VMs.
Avoided ansible in favor of simple bash scripts.
Avoid all kinds of firewalls in favor of understanding and using iptables directly.
Etc..
When it makes sense, additional layers of abstraction can always be added on top, if the foundation is solid.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#9Abstractions are like tech debt. When you consume an abstraction, you also get all the klocs (thousands of lines of code) that it represents, they have a price. When you have multiple sources (as in suppliers) of that abstraction this greatly lessons the risk. As does have an abstraction which is total.
The post and the url reminds me of the Unix Hater's Handbook. https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
The problem with the abstraction tower is not that it is a tower, but that it is square, when you can't tell where you are relative to the abstractions above or the abstractions below, then your abstraction gradient is too small and you are just generating mush. We have too much mush.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#10I feel like if I was alive and working 60 years ago I would have been saying the same thing about mechanics, construction, and analog electronics. But really it doesn't matter for most jobs. Knowing how things work underneath is needed if you are forming your own business and products from the ground up, it is only slightly useful if you are working for somebody else, and as time goes on what monetary value there is…
Yet, someone has to know this stuff, or be capable of learning how it works and as a consequence be able to work on those arcane layers. Otherwise we stand no chance of finding new, more general abstractions to construct a stack of fewer abstractions in total. We probably won't get to fewer abstractions, but to avoid making the problem get worse even faster, we need some counterweight.