2 ms·
Yes, shallow, wide, and composable. That's how our abstractions should be. But the larger problem is not GUIs. GUIs are a problem, but they are necessarily at
by marcosdumay 2y ago
Yes, shallow, wide, and composable. That's how our abstractions should be.
But the larger problem is not GUIs. GUIs are a problem, but they are necessarily at the top of the abstraction stack, so the problem doesn't compose any further. (What interestingly means they are so much of a problem that they aren't anymore.)
The elephant in the room nowadays are distributed systems.
- williamcotton 2y agoI would love to hear your thoughts on how distributed systems lead to deep, narrow and isolated abstractions. I can think of some obvious reasons but it seems like you’ve put more thought into this than I!
- marcosdumay 2y agoI haven't put anywhere near enough thought to decide on something simple. There are two main dynamics that I noticed: - Each distributed component has a high minimal cost to create and maintain, what leads people to consolidate them into more complex, fewer ones; - You'll invariably need to interact with some component that doesn't share your values. So you need security, contracts (the legal kind), consumer protection, etc... and that creeps into your abstraction. Outside of that, there's one thing that isn't inherent but does happen every single time is information erasure. Distributed interfaces are way less detailed than the ones on monolithic systems.