I'm certainly not arguing for no abstraction! Use as much as you need; nobody argues with that. These are just places where the bar for "need" isn't an aftertho

I'm certainly not arguing for no abstraction! Use as much as you need; nobody argues with that. These are just places where the bar for "need" isn't an afterthought, and effort is taken to keep abstractions minimal to avoid their cost. > Ethernet, IPv4, TCP, DNS, TLS, graphical image formats, switched networks, load balancers These abstractions exists because they are necessary. They are a bit of a mess, admittedly, but invested people have worked hard to make what they were given as small a mess as they can manage, and what is left exists because it has to historically. When your packets get pulled through hardware specifically designed to do exactly that, the abstraction almost ceases to be. (Disclaimer: not a network person) > HTTP, HTML, JavaScript These abstractions are why 12 billion instructions per second per core counts as slow now.