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▲ caaqil an hour ago

We should consider the possibility that at some abstraction levels, we can safely stop chasing "clarity" or "coherence" which is circularly defined in such a way that it's capped by human processing power.

Developers and people in CS in general seem to have gotten used to the idea that most productive SWEs don't need to exactly know how to produce assembly or trace every branch prediction or even most of the optimization the CPU (or even their compiler) is running. Mathematicians will get there.

▲jltsiren 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

CS got that idea from mathematics. Theorems (with the definitions required to state them) are supposed to be self-contained units. Once the general consensus is that a theorem has been proven correct, people can use it without understanding the proof. Of course, people still want to understand how things work, and it often makes sense to understand them a couple of layers below the one you usually work at. But at some point, you should stop distracting yourself with irrelevant details and focus on your actual work.