3 ms·

Abstraction comes at the cost of reduced specificity.

• rogerbinns 15y ago
  Make the normal things easy and the hard things possible. It has been a very long time since I cared how memory was allocated (eg pools, mmap versus heap). It has been even longer since I could determine how data was put on disk (choosing which sectors). Using Python I can say a list should be sorted and have no say over the algorithm. If I use the STL I have to make a few decisions. Java appears to have 7 different list implementations that I have to pick from. Working code that was quick to write is far more important than being very specific about every operation. In most cases it is sufficient. With profiling and real world usage you can get an idea of where more specificity is needed, but in many cases even that can be dealt with automatically (JIT, type inference, calling out to a different language). Even if you write new more specific code you can still use the existing code to test against.