4 ms·

What you are saying isn't wrong, but when someone reads "abstraction is expensive", they immediately assume the implication "and hence you shouldn't use it". T

What you are saying isn't wrong, but when someone reads "abstraction is expensive", they immediately assume the implication "and hence you shouldn't use it". To make an analogy: people shouldn't buy a sports car if they want to take their family of 5 skiing every weekend. A person might reasonably write an article on all the factors one should consider when buying a car. They shouldn't title said article "Cars are expensive", even though the reason they wrote the article is because cars are expensive and hence the choice is important.

danShumway 4y ago
> but when someone reads "abstraction is expensive", they immediately assume the implication "and hence you shouldn't use it". I suppose? But if someone's attitude is that expensive things should be universally avoided, that seems like a problem that's going to need to be addressed sooner or later. Would we be having this conversation under an article titled "abstractions have benefits"? Would we be worried that someone is going to look at that title and think, "I should use them everywhere all the time then"? I don't know. I'm not against phrasing something in a way that minimizes confusion, but on some level I think that internalizing that programming concepts aren't binary good/bad is arguably one of the most important lessons that a programmer can learn. And I regularly see a kind of pushback to the (correct) notion that abstractions have costs that I don't see in other contexts. But that could just be, and my experiences might be different than other people's. This is largely a subjective take by me, so I understand if people disagree with it, but the prevailing attitude I personally see in software development is one where people do not realize that there is a cost to abstractions, and in fact sometimes bristle at the idea that they do have costs. At most, I can get people to agree that 'bad' abstractions have costs, but it is much harder to get them to say, "it's possible to abstract too much, and even good and necessary abstractions are still additional code with additional costs." So I think the notion that it is not always correct to abstract every piece of code is weirdly controversial -- and the underlying idea behind that that I think people haven't internalized is "sometimes good things have a cost, and we should talk about the costs that they have." But again, could just be me. If a bunch of people are confused over the title, then... I mean, I can't tell people what they should and shouldn't be confused about. If it's better to communicate with them in a different way, then it is what it is. It just worries me if on a programming site so many people interpret "is expensive" as "should never be used." That's not a good programming philosophy for people to have.
grey-area 4y ago
You shouldn’t use any abstraction unless you have a good reason to do so. Why? Because it has costs which are most heavily paid by those who come after you and read or modify the code later. A small amount of the right abstraction helps understanding, too many irrelevant abstractions just gets in the way (BeanFactoryFactory etc). I’ve only seen people use too much abstraction, not too little, so the title makes perfect sense as it is to me and has the right message IMO.

danShumway 4y ago

> but when someone reads "abstraction is expensive", they immediately assume the implication "and hence you shouldn't use it". I suppose? But if someone's attitude is that expensive things should be universally avoided, that seems like a problem that's going to need to be addressed sooner or later. Would we be having this conversation under an article titled "abstractions have benefits"? Would we be worried that someone is going to look at that title and think, "I should use them everywhere all the time then"? I don't know. I'm not against phrasing something in a way that minimizes confusion, but on some level I think that internalizing that programming concepts aren't binary good/bad is arguably one of the most important lessons that a programmer can learn. And I regularly see a kind of pushback to the (correct) notion that abstractions have costs that I don't see in other contexts. But that could just be, and my experiences might be different than other people's. This is largely a subjective take by me, so I understand if people disagree with it, but the prevailing attitude I personally see in software development is one where people do not realize that there is a cost to abstractions, and in fact sometimes bristle at the idea that they do have costs. At most, I can get people to agree that 'bad' abstractions have costs, but it is much harder to get them to say, "it's possible to abstract too much, and even good and necessary abstractions are still additional code with additional costs." So I think the notion that it is not always correct to abstract every piece of code is weirdly controversial -- and the underlying idea behind that that I think people haven't internalized is "sometimes good things have a cost, and we should talk about the costs that they have." But again, could just be me. If a bunch of people are confused over the title, then... I mean, I can't tell people what they should and shouldn't be confused about. If it's better to communicate with them in a different way, then it is what it is. It just worries me if on a programming site so many people interpret "is expensive" as "should never be used." That's not a good programming philosophy for people to have.

grey-area 4y ago

You shouldn’t use any abstraction unless you have a good reason to do so. Why? Because it has costs which are most heavily paid by those who come after you and read or modify the code later. A small amount of the right abstraction helps understanding, too many irrelevant abstractions just gets in the way (BeanFactoryFactory etc). I’ve only seen people use too much abstraction, not too little, so the title makes perfect sense as it is to me and has the right message IMO.