This was/is a failure of pedagogy. I was taught abstraction as a virtue, embraced it, learned this lesson, and then noticed that the experienced programmers (n

This was/is a failure of pedagogy. I was taught abstraction as a virtue, embraced it, learned this lesson, and then noticed that the experienced programmers (not the pedagogists and professional authors) had been saying all along that until you had seen three distinct cases of something in the wild you were in no position to create an abstraction for it.