> Abstractions are good when they reduce boilerplate and provide a shorthand for monotonous work. When abstractions try to be smart or magical and do work for y

> Abstractions are good when they reduce boilerplate and provide a shorthand for monotonous work. When abstractions try to be smart or magical and do work for you, it's almost always a bad thing. Depends on your environment ... and the abstractions. Haskell has a lot of guarantees that C will never have. These guarantees often mean that making abstractions are a lot less error-prone and potentially a lot more useful. In general, stronger language semantics gives the implementation of the language more leeway to optimize. All of the undefined behavior in C is a pretty good reason to step extremely carefully while doing anything, especially creating abstractions. > the C programming language abstracts over assembly, and essentially formalizes a subset of assembly in a way which reduces cognitive load for the programmer. Languages like Haskell attempt to abstract over computation in general; It makes C and Java seem a lot closer together in the spectrum of languages. I'm by no means an expert Haskell'er but just dabbling with it has been illuminating and I've written code in various languages since the 90's. I hope the GP comment "personal comprehension issue" hasn't thrown you too far off. I think there might be a more tasteful way to express what they were thinking but I can't speak for them.