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Parent's comment was against excessive, i.e. superfluous abstraction. And that pretty much by definition must be avoided. Abstraction in itself is a good thing

Parent's comment was against excessive, i.e. superfluous abstraction. And that pretty much by definition must be avoided. Abstraction in itself is a good thing. I just think of it as "compression". We have to express solutions to problems in the shortest way possible, otherwise they become unmaintainable. What most people fail to see that a dead simple language like C provides with all of the tools to solve many problems with good or optimal abstraction. And if you add abstraction like OO and implicit memory management to solutions for many complex or performance-oriented problem domains, these solutions become effectively non-solutions. Because in these problem domains, decisions about memory allocation or data organisation are part of the solution.

stouset 9y ago
"Excessive" abstraction is a misnomer. I can practically guarantee you that whatever level of abstraction we're working at today, we'll be working several layers deeper ten years from now. Arguing that, e.g., generics are "excessive" abstraction when we're already dozens of layers away from manipulating transistor voltages is bordering on the absurd. The issue people should be fighting against isn't excessive abstraction, since the only way to do so is to counterproductively inhibit abstraction in the general sense. We as an industry should focus on how to develop good abstractions while avoiding bad ones. Not that I have any particular insights on how to approach that problem. I'm just convinced that avoiding abstractions at all is throwing the baby, bathtub, and entire bathroom out with the bathwater.