I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but it's also not clear to me that we really disagree. Abstractions are often leaky, yes; sometimes unavoidably s

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but it's also not clear to me that we really disagree. Abstractions are often leaky, yes; sometimes unavoidably so, and then those leakages have to be taken into account in the design of the system; but when leakage is avoidable, do you not agree that it's important to avoid it? I do agree that there's such a thing as over-abstraction, and over-engineering in general. I recall a discussion here on HN, oh, probably 2 or 3 years ago if not more, where somebody said they had written an app and then hired a programmer to maintain it, and the programmer started by "enterprisifying" it, adding lots of dependency injection and factory-factories and suchlike, rendering the code almost unrecognizable to the initial developer. Without having seen the code in both "before" and "after" states, I can't form a firm opinion about whether this was really an improvement, but I could easily believe that it was not. Certainly if I were the initial developer, I would want to know specifically what the benefit of each of these changes was expected to be.