4 ms·

There are people who cannot use an abstraction unless they understand every line of code behind it. Abstractions are blockers, rather than aids. This lowers the

There are people who cannot use an abstraction unless they understand every line of code behind it. Abstractions are blockers, rather than aids. This lowers the value of abstraction for those individuals. Others find it tiresome to read every line of code and develop intuition around abstractions instead. The "find_definition" function will be all that is parsed. The funny thing is people shift between the two as the scope of the project increases.

bluGill 6y ago
In a real project - millions of lines of code - there is no chance to understand it all. You have to trust the abstraction does what it says without caring how it works. You only break the abstraction and understand when you have reason to suspect that it somehow isn't obeying your quick mental model of what it does - normally this means you suspect the bug you are working on is down that abstraction, but sometimes it is just the name is bad and so you need to figure out what it is really doing.