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>With more understanding one has more potential for optimization. And I don't mean performance or memory. I mean conceptual optimization. Reducing a solution of

>With more understanding one has more potential for optimization. And I don't mean performance or memory. I mean conceptual optimization. Reducing a solution of a problem to the minimum amount of concepts needed and finding a set of correct concepts to use in the solution Except what I'm saying is that human brain has biological limits on how much and what it can understand. Eventually a system can become so complex the only way it can be developed is through the efforts of multiple people specializing on specific components. >When one does not understand the details and instead just pokes around in the code "until it works", one will forever be blind for that kind of optimization and the solution created tends to have leaky abstractions and become even less composable when trying to use it to solve future problems. For a sufficiently complex system This cannot be Avoided, simply because the system is too complex to be fully understood by a single person. I am 100% talking about conceptual optimization.

zelphirkalt 4y ago
I get what you are saying and it is definitely true, that systems can become too big to keep in mind completely. However, with proper and non-leaky abstractions it should be possible to reason about the system at each level of abstraction, without having to think about the lower level. The thing is then, that one could descend into the level 1 lower than one is looking at, if needed, and find out, that a simpler primitive could be used to cover more ground. For example: Exceptions can be implemented using continuations. A return statement can also be implemented using continuations. Both can be implemented using the same concept. On the layer of exceptions and return statements, they seem like different things, but we can look under the hood and see, that we could use continuations, a single concept, to express both, if we wanted. With such optimizations one can reduce the number of concepts on needs to keep in mind lower and the system more understandable.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

I get what you are saying and it is definitely true, that systems can become too big to keep in mind completely. However, with proper and non-leaky abstractions it should be possible to reason about the system at each level of abstraction, without having to think about the lower level. The thing is then, that one could descend into the level 1 lower than one is looking at, if needed, and find out, that a simpler primitive could be used to cover more ground. For example: Exceptions can be implemented using continuations. A return statement can also be implemented using continuations. Both can be implemented using the same concept. On the layer of exceptions and return statements, they seem like different things, but we can look under the hood and see, that we could use continuations, a single concept, to express both, if we wanted. With such optimizations one can reduce the number of concepts on needs to keep in mind lower and the system more understandable.