Abstractions are convenience. They’re not free, there is a cost to any work you ask the computer to do. Just staying at the surface level and never understanding what’s under the top level is why software is slow and bloated today. You’re supposed to move beyond the abstraction, understand what you need underneath and use what you really want to do the task.

No wonder we boot up entire browser engines to write simple text editors. But hey, we gotta be first to market to get that VC money, right?

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nomel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I disagree.

Abstractions are not a convenience, they're a cognitive necessity, compressing large aspects of the problem space into easy to not think about blocks, allowing humans, with their limited working memory, to reason about larger problems. The only reason a seasoned developer can think at a high/system level is because of the abstractions/compressions they've formed in their heads.

Technology exists to make it so we don't have to think about/put time into low level things, so we can do more interesting things instead. Not thinking about banal things is the foundation of progress.

AI seems to be the give us an abstraction I've been waiting for: a method to write code at the level of libraries , with libraries working with/adapting to other libraries.

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TheSamFischer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There are plenty of people who understand the stack and ship actually fast software. This might be a skill issue that you’re choosing to frame as a “best practice”, because you do not want to put in the work.

Our end users are who should benefit. You’re the pilot in the seat who doesn’t know what the throttle is and you’re telling the passenger it’s the plane’s fault it’s slow.

	▲	nomel an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> that you’re choosing to frame as a “best practice”, I don't follow. > because you do not want to put in the work. Yes, just as nobody wants to type opcodes, or write their own http clients, or etc. It's why most of us use higher level languages. Leave the solved things solved, and work on actually interesting/new things! That doesn't mean not understanding, it just means not wasting time on the same boilerplate/code duplicated by millions of developers.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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