We have used too many levels of abstractions • Hacker News Board

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#121

Post by dgfitz » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:31 AM UTC

BigJono wrote: post #43

mrkeen wrote: post #22

I think a good first step towards improvement in this space is by separating the terms 'abstraction' and 'indirection'. Programmers too often add indirections which don't provide abstraction: * The programmer wants to POST an object to a web server. * The programmer also wants to think about it at the level of POSTing an object to a web server. * And yet the programmer creates an HttpClient.java and an AbstractClient…

I think the reason people do that stuff is because they do provide abstraction, but they only do it in UML diagrams, not in the code. I've found the shittest programmers to work with are the ones that think visually, because in their head they just deleted two boxes and four lines, but in reality all they did was add 40 lines of code that do nothing.

I’ve found the shittiest devs still use UML.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956298

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#122

Post by worthless-trash » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:32 AM UTC

djur wrote: post #113

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

This is not consistent with my experience with younger devs. There are teenagers doing kernel-level hacking and there's also older people who have been comfortably driving RAD tools for decades. This is fine. Software development has been gradually specializing and it will continue to do so. The tools and resources available for people who want to pursue low-level engineering are better, cheaper, and more accessible…

My $management have said that there are nearly no teenagers who will apply for kernel work. You got someone I can reach out to when the option comes up again ?

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#123

Post by tgv » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:36 AM UTC

warkanlock wrote: post #17

This is an insightful article, although I don't necessarily agree with the view that "everyone" needs to know everything from first principles to be good at their job. Talking about abstractions, during my past month, I was reading nand2tetris, and it's a compelling experience if you understand the exercise you are doing, which is not about building a computer from first principles; it's much more than that. It makes…

> However, this is not for everyone; ask a musician if they are really in the weeds of why the instrument is producing music (the physics behind it!). They are probably aware that it's vibrating air, but, in general, they won't know the theory behind it.

Not a great metaphor. First, most instruments were invented by people who had no knowledge of the theory, not even of sound involving vibrating air. Second, many musicians do understand some of how their instrument works. It's not hard to understand how a guitar works, how to tune it, and how to fix a broken string. Most can't fix a broken body or neck, but they do understand why it stopped being playable. Hell, I knew a flutist who simply started to build her own recorders. Zero knowledge of physics, but after a few years producing great sounding period instruments.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#124

Post by BiteCode_dev » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:37 AM UTC

ksec wrote: post #120

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually see this with new frontend devs. They know only full SPA frameworks, they have never seen a dump of an HTTP message, headers and verbs are abstract things to them. Hell, many of them don't know you can have fully functional websites with zero JS, including payment, video, login, etc. I started to write an HTMX tutorial ( https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-little-taste-of-htmx-part-1 ) because I noticed a l…

>You can actually see this with new frontend devs. They know only full SPA frameworks, ...... Around I guess 2017 or even 2016? I used to think this is some sort internet troll comment about people never seen a dump of an HTTP message, until...... >Because they started with assembly. It wasn't necessary starting with assembly or something low level. ( Although that certainly helped ) We have less entertainment, more…

Having to figure it out is not specific to a generation. My generation had magazines and forums. Then came out google and SO. Now chat gpt.

The difference is where you start figuring things out.

Before, you needed to figure things out at your level, because it was the immediate area of mystery.

Now this level is generally solved, you need to figure things out at a different level:

- filter out the mass of irrelevant information, the out dates one, and the one from spam

- understand how all those complex abstractions interact. We have good resources on how each work individually, but the carthesian product of the monsters we build with them, we obviously don't

- debug some things that don't work when the magic fails, way below your level, or behind a service, where nobody is looking

The problem before was scarcity of info, lack of standardization and roughness of systems.

Now it's abundance, opacity and too much sophistication.

But everybody still have to figure things out. Just no the same challenges.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#125

Post by otteromkram » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:39 AM UTC

okaleniuk wrote: post #107

"Abstraction" is a misnomer. This word has its useful meaning in math and art, but in software engineering, all what we call "abstraction" is automation in disguise. When you write a piece of "abstract" code, you only delegate writing the piece of concrete code to your compiler or run-time type deduction. And as soon as this is clear, the attitude follows. Should you know how every aspect of your code is compiled or…

I disagree and believe "abstraction" is the correct term for wgat the author intended.

> Computer science commonly presents levels (or, less commonly, layers) of abstraction, wherein each level represents a different model of the same information and processes, but with varying amounts of detail.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_scienc...

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#126

Post by devjab » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:41 AM UTC

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

If you’re managers and tech leads then why aren’t you making sure the people you’re supposed to lead obtain the understanding?

We work with both high and low level tools where I work, and in my experience there isn’t necessarily a lack of understanding among younger developers. The CS courses still teach you a lot of the basics, and to actually use what you call “hype” tools efficiently you typically need a rather good understanding of how they work.

I actually don’t think we have enough abstraction, especially not in the DevOps field. In my opinion we’ve overcomplicated the deployment procedure without making sure it was abstracted. We don’t need our software developers to know how our Cloud Networking and Virtual Networking works, we don’t need them to spin up resources and make various internal DNS and Firewall rules, we simply need them to focus on what they’re good at and then hand off the container to the operations department where people actually specialise in that knowledge. I’m actually fine with infrastructure as code, but it needs to be templated to the point that our developers simply “order”resources based on whatever template they want to deploy so that they don’t have to keep up with the constant changes or learn how networking in enterprise organisations work.

As far as the CPU stuff goes. Young developers do a lot of low level code. We write a lot of embedded software for our solar plants, and a lot of the time, they seem far more capable and “modern” in their approaches than the “old guard” exactly because they’ve been taught the same curriculum but also all the lesson learned by the “old guard” along the way. That being said, it’s not really necessary for a lot of developers to keep an active knowledge of how an x86 CPU works, because it’s very unlike that they’ll have to work with it. It will often be far more useful to know how various types of ARM processors work, as that’s something a lot of us actively work with.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#127

Post by gemstones » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:42 AM UTC

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, security people are the worst at this. I’m not sure if the problem is that they have so many certs that you can just memorize canned answers and get a job rather than go through an SWE coding test at most places, or something else.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#128

Post by criddell » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:43 AM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #45

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

There will be an increasingly important history component in comp sci., software engineering, infosec, and associated fields. I think this is a place where the IT field has done a bad job and, as a result, we've had unbelievable amounts of "wheel reinvention". I'd love to hear from somebody with experience in scientific or other disciplines and IT who could contrast their fields with ours. I only know that I have had…

I couldn’t agree more and it’s something I didn’t understand at all until my final year at university. I was talking with one of my professors and complained about having to learn and use SML and Eiffel for some projects when in the real world, I’d be using something like C (this was 1994). He asked me if I was there for an education or training.

I think today it’s probably more true than ever. Schools are under pressure to turn out grads who will be productive on day one and I think it’s shortsighted.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#129

Post by coldtea » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:44 AM UTC

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

>The issue, as with any automation, is that new players on the scene (younger devs, devops, etc.) simply have no chance to learn the same things and go trough the same path.

The worst problem, which TFA alludes to, is that those "layers" are not really needed, they are leaky kludges upon kludges to make some lower layer unsuitable for later needs more palatable or able to handle some unforeseen use case that's against its design. Other stuff is just added as ways to sell new enterprise tooling, support and consulting.

Seeing the layers and technology stacks being added over time can give the impression of watching some organic evolution happen, when it's often merely accumulation, rough patching, and corporate attempt to push its technologies/NIH.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#130

Post by Mordisquitos » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 11:45 AM UTC

bongobingo1 wrote: post #93

cjalmeida wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that advanced math has a similar problem, that some subjects are quite deep that only a handful of people really understand the topic and passing the knowledge down to younger mathematicians is not a given.

Are there good historical examples of this happening, where foundational knowledge is completely lost? I know I have read about it in books as a fiction, but I assume it must have already happened here before. Maybe its an oxymoronic question to ask, seeing as if its lost we might not even know its lost, but more in the vein of "We put the lime in the mortar because this is what we have always done", unaware of the a…

> Are there good historical examples of this happening, where foundational knowledge is completely lost?

Maybe not quite in the context you were asking, but philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues as the premise in his book After Ethics that this is what happened to the philosophy of ethics after antiquity.

Copypasting from its Wikipedia article [0]:

> [After Ethics] begins with an allegory suggestive of the premise of the science-fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz: a world where all sciences have been dismantled quickly and almost entirely. MacIntyre asks what the sciences would look like if they were re-assembled from the remnants of scientific knowledge that survived the catastrophe.

> He claims that the new sciences, though superficially similar to the old, would in fact be devoid of real scientific content, because the key suppositions and attitudes would not be present. "The hypothesis which I wish to advance", he continues, "is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described." Specifically, MacIntyre applies this hypothesis to advance the notion that the moral structures that emerged from the Enlightenment were philosophically doomed from the start because they were formed using the aforementioned incoherent language of morality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue