Advanced abstractions are challenging to design well and could be harder to debug, but they can also improve efficiency and power by orders of magnitude. There

Advanced abstractions are challenging to design well and could be harder to debug, but they can also improve efficiency and power by orders of magnitude. There are good abstractions and bad abstractions. If you use and create good ones, you will be a better developer. It´s important not to overdo it or to use the wrong abstraction for the job, but there are alternatives to slogging aroud in html and sql all day. By using a good orm and language abstractions like haml or coffeescript, I produce much, much less code, it´s much easier to read and maintain, and I can produce more quicker for clients as a result. If another developer can´t look at haml or coffeescript and understand it very quickly, I wouldn´t want them working on my code anyway. I can also produce more for clients by building even higher level abstractions so I can do things like generate forms, views, lists etc. for 30 different kinds of objects from a couple configuration files instead of hundreds of individual files for each type. Is the coding harder? Sometimes. But it also makes possible features and data usage that wouldn´t otherwise be realistic and allows for rapid modifications to the whole system without searching for dependencies all over the place. All levels of the web stack are an abstraction of some form right down to the chip. In the future, we will inevitably adopt higher and higher levels of abstraction in our computing, just as we have since computers were invented. Abstraction should be studied, practiced, and used with care, not resisted.