It's unfortunate that you have only ever experienced abstractions which grow in size over time. The best abstractions out there are ones which operate well toge

It's unfortunate that you have only ever experienced abstractions which grow in size over time. The best abstractions out there are ones which operate well together to solve a large set of problems in the smallest amount of complexity (local to any given abstraction) as well as the smallest amount of total complexity at any given abstraction layer, as well as the smallest amount of total solution complexity. Now yes, this end goal is an idealized world, when you build on top of crusty old APIs and crusty old software you inevitably end up with crusty abstractions, especially difficult to deal with is the real world. That being said, there are plenty of examples out there where complexity at all three levels of detail that I outlined above has been painstakingly minimized. It usually takes a lot more effort to produce a simple solution to a problem than a complex one. This really requires the "alignment" the article talks about. Speaking of "alignment", ORM is one of the best examples of complete and total misalignment. The sets-of-tuples model of relational databases and the graph-of-objects model of object oriented systems are so seriously at odds with each other that there isn't a single ORM out there which successfully fully resolves the mismatch without severe abstraction leaks. (No, the fact that you can successfully use an ORM without abstraction leaks at the cost of severe performance degradation doesn't really matter.) On the other hand, large parts of the design of a project such as Plan 9 are extremely aligned.