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This paints abstraction like an evil, but it's an unavoidable tool for any human-made software to reach certain capabilities Rich Hickey said something along t
by brundolf 2y ago
This paints abstraction like an evil, but it's an unavoidable tool for any human-made software to reach certain capabilities
Rich Hickey said something along the lines of "A novice juggler may be able to juggle two or three balls, but the best juggler in the world can only juggle maybe nine balls. There isn't an order of magnitude difference in human ability, we hit a ceiling quickly." If we are to surpass those limits, we have no choice but to abstract
Of course there may be bad abstractions or too many abstractions in a given case, which is what I think the author is mad at. But that's an important distinction
This part is also plainly false:
> It is no longer easy to build software, and nothing comes with a manual.
Making software has never been easier or better-documented
- dgb23 2y agoIn that talk he mainly proposes simplicity (decomposition) rather than abstraction. We don’t necessarily need indirection to understand a whole, complex thing. In order to deal with complexity, we need to disentangle it, so we can understand each part in isolation. Hiding complexity with indirection, puts distance between the us and thing we have to reason about. Abstraction is good for users (devs or not), so they don’t have to care about the details, but it doesn’t make it easier for us to build it.