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"you can use abstractions but keep them transparent" Wouldn't it defeat the purpose of abstraction?

• ploxiln 11y ago
  Not all the purposes. Abstractions can still make the complexity more manageable. Linux kernel developers write the vast majority of their code in C but very often inspect the assembly instructions generated by the compiler. Web developers have many templating languages with macro capabilities (or sass for css), but still want the generated html to be basically readable, so they can verify the templating is doing what they want, and they can debug things. Some people really can and do ignore things below a particular abstraction, but then there are others who must service that layer transition. And not just the original authors of it. If you have an effective web company of more than, perhaps, 30 developers, at least one of them is dealing with server connection state statistics, occasionally problematic internet routes, occasionally problematic switch configuration or hardware (even on an opaque cloud platform). Someone has to deal with it, or else stuff is kinda flaky, and no one seems to know why...