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> But as a developer I just can't stand all the complexity and the magic going o It's compilers and abstractions all the way down, I don't get why people want

by duped 4y ago

> But as a developer I just can't stand all the complexity and the magic going o It's compilers and abstractions all the way down, I don't get why people want to be able to hold the entire stack in their head at once. That ship sailed - decades ago.

the_only_law 4y ago
> It's compilers and abstractions all the way down, I don't get why people want to be able to hold the entire stack in their head at once. That ship sailed - decades ago. Some of us got into the field because of the curiosity of wanting to know how things worked and weren’t satisfied by vague, high level, abstract versions. I imagine this is why I’m so poor at math and physics though.
- duped 4y ago
  There's nothing wrong with that, but physics and math are also about taking understanding, then building useful abstractions around it to deal with inherent complexity. I find the "complexity bad and makes me sad" attitude around development to be almost paradoxical - our job is literally to abstract things. If you seek for complete understanding you'll never find it. There's always an abstraction underneath and one to build on top.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    That’s fair, FWIW, I don’t hate abstractions, and often prefer them (recently had a project I switched form primarily C to primarily Erlang because the abstractions provided allowed an amazing level of expressiveness given my project), but I like having a idea of how my abstractions work and preferably where to look when they fail.
0xblinq 4y ago
Well, then it’s not JavaScript anymore? I love abstractions, but lately all the ones provided by next.js related to the server stuff are pretty leaky, and the compiler looks to me like it’s going to be the most leaky of them. There’s also that thing about understanding your layer and the layer below to be able to debug. At this point “my layer” is complex enough that I can’t even think on debugging what’s going on with an error in a hook that was inserted by a compiler while SSRing a client side component which toggles a drop-down.

by duped 4y ago

the_only_law 4y ago

> It's compilers and abstractions all the way down, I don't get why people want to be able to hold the entire stack in their head at once. That ship sailed - decades ago. Some of us got into the field because of the curiosity of wanting to know how things worked and weren’t satisfied by vague, high level, abstract versions. I imagine this is why I’m so poor at math and physics though.

duped 4y ago
There's nothing wrong with that, but physics and math are also about taking understanding, then building useful abstractions around it to deal with inherent complexity. I find the "complexity bad and makes me sad" attitude around development to be almost paradoxical - our job is literally to abstract things. If you seek for complete understanding you'll never find it. There's always an abstraction underneath and one to build on top.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  That’s fair, FWIW, I don’t hate abstractions, and often prefer them (recently had a project I switched form primarily C to primarily Erlang because the abstractions provided allowed an amazing level of expressiveness given my project), but I like having a idea of how my abstractions work and preferably where to look when they fail.

0xblinq 4y ago

Well, then it’s not JavaScript anymore? I love abstractions, but lately all the ones provided by next.js related to the server stuff are pretty leaky, and the compiler looks to me like it’s going to be the most leaky of them. There’s also that thing about understanding your layer and the layer below to be able to debug. At this point “my layer” is complex enough that I can’t even think on debugging what’s going on with an error in a hook that was inserted by a compiler while SSRing a client side component which toggles a drop-down.