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Right now it’s in vogue to criticize abstraction. Bur every single advance we’ve had in software engineering is thanks to abstraction. The issue isn’t that abs
by stouset 3y ago
Right now it’s in vogue to criticize abstraction.
Bur every single advance we’ve had in software engineering is thanks to abstraction. The issue isn’t that abstraction is bad, it’s that bad abstractions are bad. Finding good ones is hard, and people have begun to assume it’s impossible (or at least not worth the effort).
IMO this is a symptom of the exponential growth in our field. Experienced engineers who know how to do this well are outnumbered by well-meaning novices who output ten times as many LOC with half the value.
In my mind we shouldn’t be avoiding abstraction, we should be learning what makes one good and learning to emulate that.
- 082349872349872 3y agoDoug McIlroy once said something to the effect that the wonderful thing about his team was that he'd come into the lunch room, and instead of talking about new features requiring adding a bunch of code, they'd be talking about new abstractions allowing them to delete a bunch of code.