Often times people don't want the general thing. They want to know how to solve a problem. An analogy I might give is memory ordering constraints in C++. If so

Often times people don't want the general thing. They want to know how to solve a problem. An analogy I might give is memory ordering constraints in C++. If somebody comes to you and says "hey I've got some concurrent code that has these requirements", it might be thoroughly reasonable to give them a recipe that uses a particular sequencing constraint and operation pattern even though you could have a much more general discussion of the nature of happens-before relationships and proofs of correctness of concurrent algorithms. But somebody's eyes might glaze over. This is even true in mathematics. Sometimes you want to learn the full abstraction. Sometimes you want recipes that let you solve a PDE.