10 ms·

Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

• jrm4 2y ago
  This feels like plumbers thinking that using some weird type of toilet fitting is killing civilization.
  • mexicocitinluez 2y ago
    that is exactly what it is. it's a pseudo-intellectual (in this case Jonathon Blow) who thinks he's got it all figured out.
• dostick 2y ago
  It appears that author is from that newer generation, and completely misses points because he just don’t know. Ironically the article is an example of what Blow was talking about. similar happens if I talk about how Figma is destroying the design world on unprecedented scale by normalising bad UX, UI and product management found in Figma itself, and get responses from younger designers that everything is great, completely baffled. You have all that knowledge because you grew up in that environment. They didn’t, and not likely they can learn the equivalent of culture and experience anywhere.
  • gtsop 2y ago
    Which points do you think the author has missed?
  • xandrius 2y ago
    Could you expand on how Figma is destroying the design world?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • low_tech_punk 2y ago
      I'm curious too. I want to understand "Figma is destroying the design world on unprecedented scale by normalising bad UX, UI and product management found in Figma itself".
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • senordevnyc 2y ago
    So your rebuttal is that they’re wrong because they’re young and inexperienced? OK, maybe, but what exactly are they wrong about? You haven’t actually added anything to the conversation with this ad hominem attack.
    • rat87 2y ago
      Also I couldn't find the authors age but judging by the fact they say they still use an Amiga they're probably at least in their 40s(unless they're a huge retro fan)
      • john_the_writer 2y ago
        Also talked about C64's, like they lived through it. That brings them into their 50's. I got the feeling they've been at it a long time.
        • throw-qqqqq 2y ago
          I’m 38 and from Northern Europe. We had a C64 when I was a kid. Tech spread slower outside the US back then I think :)
  • rat87 2y ago
    He demolished Blows argument so I don't think it's important to bring up age but it does seem like he is likely at least in his mid forties. The Amiga was popular in the late 80s > "The argument that software is advancing is obviously false" I still regularly use my beloved Amiga computers. A couple of weeks ago, I was copying a file to an Amiga's hard drive when the computer suddenly decided to crash on me. Not because I did something wrong, but because old home computer OS:es weren't very stable. This resulted in a corrupted hard drive partition and the OS failed to re-validate the file system. My only option was, in the end, to re-format the partition. I don't even know much about design but I can tell your claims about Figma are totally wrong, in a similar fashion to blows claims. It's the nostalgia talking. You're forgetting the fact that user interface has always had a lot of crap, just like software just like everything. The positives of the old cream of the crop is remembered while all the crap and even all the failings of the well designed things are forgotten
    • foobiekr 2y ago
      Figma absolutely sucks. It is slow, but more importantly, by encouraging UX designers to work in high fidelity designs where live changes are frustrating and feedback is entirely incorporated as a bunch of mostly-hidden comments in a sandbox that makes it hard for reviewers to follow up on or reference back to, all it's done is made everything worse.
  • jibal 2y ago
    "It appears that author is from that newer generation" No it doesn't. Nothing else you wrote here is true either.
• gtsop 2y ago
  It is unfortunate that someone needs to pick apart a flawed thesis in such detail (as the author did with Blow). The pure empiricist is equaly as detached from reality as the pure theorist, and as such Blow is making up arguments just because they fit his experience, cherry picking examples that fit his rants and promoting the exception to be the rule.
• rat87 2y ago
  No https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... Of course not And if it were it wouldn't be something c or c++ related but all the banks and unemployment systems still written in COBOL
• knodi 2y ago
  Why stop here… not say easy access to clean water is destroying your health. Should walk two miles to the watering hole, carry it back, collect wood for fire and boil the water your self… \s
  • danparsonson 2y ago
    Well indeed - abstraction is a cornerstone of progress, not a hindrance to it. Most of us will die from dehydration or water-borne disease or hunger if civilisation collapses though!
  • yoyohello13 2y ago
    Ngl, forcing people to walk two miles for water everyday would probably make a significant dent in obesity related mortality.
• sd9 2y ago
  Blow often makes fantastic points about development, and often completely misses the mark. He’s accomplished great things and has ideas worth listening to - but also plenty of nonsense that’s presented indistinguishably. I felt quite strongly that the collapse of civilisation talk was one of those pieces of nonsense, and I’ve largely ignored it (despite listening to it twice). I’m grateful to OP for providing a more principled rebuttal. Don’t even get me started on Casey Muratori, who tries to do the Blow thing but doesn’t even get the good parts right.
  • bena 2y ago
    Does he though? It seems like he just makes these broad critical statements then pisses off to continue to do nothing. I wouldn’t even say he’s accomplished great things. He’s accomplished some decent things. He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. They’re more like puzzles. You don’t need to play them ever again after you finish the first time. Braid is ok. And the Witness is just Flow. And then after that he’s been working on a programming language for the past decade which he hasn’t released to the public because “it’s not finished”. He got lucky and made his nut and ever since then has thought of himself as way more talented than he is.
    • torlok 2y ago
      I think you're getting close to ad hominem. It should be sufficient to point out how little overall people like Blow have accomplished. Blow is a hard worker, and yet it took him and his team 8 years to develop The Witness, which as you pointed out isn't anything revolutionary. I think there's a weird form of elitism at play here. Working close to the hardware isn't hard. There was a point in my early 20s where I too felt like I'm better, because I know how a computer works, or that making games in pure C is harder than in C++. As an adult this is cringe. I work in embedded, and I can tell you there's enough low level programmers out there to threaten my job security.
      • xanthor 2y ago
        Have you shipped a commercial-quality 3D game engine and game? How long did it take you?
• keninorlando 2y ago
  I miss assembler and maximizing code efficiency to juggle 2k of ram.
  • chgs 2y ago
    Plenty of hand written assembler in core programs like ffmpeg. Sure most people glue together tedious JavaScript frameworks but there’s still people doing real work.
    • saagarjha 2y ago
      …which isn't just writing writing assembly for ffmpeg.
  • yoyohello13 2y ago
    Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but I do unironically miss this.
• recursivedoubts 2y ago
  I teach the systems class at Montana State, where we go from transistors up to a real computing system, and I have students that don't understand what a file system really is when they start my class I agree that blow is wrong on some details, but I really think we need to be thinking hard around a NAND-to-Tetris style education that starts in high school for our technical students. I use "outdated" models like Little Man Computer and a simple visual MIPS emulator which, even though they aren't realistic, at least give the students a sense of where we came from, with a level of complexity that a normal human can get their head around. When I look at modern 64 bit architecture books that get suggested for me to teach with I just laugh. Anyway, not to say I agree 100% with Blow on everything, but connecting technology down to the roots is a hard problem.
  • ixtli 2y ago
    I got this exact style of education at UMass Amherst's 4 year CS undergrad degree program 2005-2010 and it absolutely made me the engineer i am today. would recommend 10/10.
  • layer8 2y ago
    The concept of files and file systems is useful to regular computer users, even when they have no interest in knowing how things work under the hood. The issue is with mobile OSs, and that software companies like their apps to be a walled garden for your data as much as possible, and therefore resist exposing your data as files living in a normal shared file system. Even if you already work with files, they have you “import” your existing data into their storage system, and you have to manually “export” (or “share”) any modifications as a new, separate copy.
    • recursivedoubts 2y ago
      Yes, also the curse of modern desktop os’s trying to trick people into storing data in the cloud. The notion of just having files somewhere accessible and organized in a reasonable manner isn’t clear to many (most?) of my students.
      • 2y ago
• lakomen 2y ago
  [dead]
• low_tech_punk 2y ago
  I think this post is related: We are destroying software (https://antirez.com/news/145 https://antirez.com/news/145) I don't disagree that software engineering is not as rigorous as it was. But software has also spread into much wider area, allowing many more people to participate as programmers, all thanks to abstractions. I'm drawn to the romantic/pure/spartan aspect of low level programming too but I also need to make a living by solving problems in practical and scrappy ways.
  • cyberax 2y ago
    > I don't disagree that software engineering is not as rigorous as it was. Such an utter BS. Modern run-of-the-mill software would run stadiums around the software of 80-s or 90-s. Version tracking, continuous integration, and even _bug_ tracking was not at all common in 90-s. Testing? That's so far ahead of the state-of-the-art of even 2000-s that it's not even funny. Even the basic unit testing was a huge step ahead in 2000-s. And fuzz testing, ubiquitous sanitizers, time-travel debugging are all novel to the mainstream development. And that's not all. We're now not just talking about formal methods, but applying them in practice (see: WUFFS). And we now have safety-oriented low-level languages like Rust (that's just basically 10 years old).
• ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  I think JavaScript on the server and React and these things has really made the web a mess of software development compared to how little stuff it actually does. I know for a fact a bunch of kids now do not even know that HTML is what gets rendered in the browser. They think that React is itself what browsers render. Not to mention the absolute idiot of a CEO of Vercel who thinks React is the Linux kernel of development.
  • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    That was the whole point of react, right? To create something that wouldn't work at all without JavaScript enabled and would be enough of a mess that Facebook could effectively hide their malware in it. I think many of Blow's points are good, but that he overlooks that much of the degradation isn't a facet of some kind of generational drift or information entropy but is straight up malevolence on the part of people making the decisions.
    • gardenhedge 2y ago
      What malware has Facebook hidden in React?
      • piperswe 2y ago
        I think they were referring to spyware hidden in Facebook's JavaScript, which uses React
        • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
          Yes. Particularly it's those little badges that let you share some content or other on the social media site of your choice. I'm under the impression that whether you click them or not, they are phoning home to Facebook about your behavior. So it's not hidden in react itself but rather in the constructed-on-page-load-and-hard-to-disable-just-parts-of space which react creates. I'll confess to not having merely read about this skulduggery and not analyzed it myself. But it certainly explains why Facebook open sourced react and also why those things are everywhere. Is there a better explanation?
• deleted 2y ago
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• ninetyninenine 2y ago
  No it’s not. Software is killing the US and not because it abstracts low level stuff. It’s because it abstracts reality in such a way that the US is becoming a nation of software engineers ignorant of even how to build the stuff it programs. We’ve moved up the stack and moving up the stack requires people knowledgeable about the bottom. One can’t exist without the other so the world isn’t getting destroyed. China is handling the bottom of the stack. And by understanding the bottom of the stack they also become good with the top. I used to hear shit like China only knows how to manufacture stuff the US is good at design. And I keep thinking well if you submit an entire design to China to manufacture you don’t think they will figure out how to design? Knowing how to design is easy. Manufacturing or turning that design into reality is hard. Software isn’t killing civilization. It’s killing the US and that may seem like the world if you lived here all your life.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    You realize that the US is still designing the most advanced processors and technology. Now if you argued that the US has forgotten how to manufacture anything, I would agree with you.
    • ninetyninenine 2y ago
      No. Taiwan and Korea are on par for design.
      • scarface_74 2y ago
        Taiwan doesn’t “design” any leading edge chip they manufacture them. Where are the great chios from Korea? The top Android phones are four years behind iPhones as far as performance - including those from Samsung
        • sampullman 2y ago
          Don't discount MediaTek, and four years is an exaggeration.
• torlok 2y ago
  As somebody who works in embedded, and does kernel programming and low level networking, I wish any of Blow's fear mongering was true. It would do wonders to my feeling of job security and self importance.
• harrall 2y ago
  If an older web developer rants about abstraction, they will target React developers. If a Python dev rants about abstraction, they will target older web developers. If a C++ application dev rants about abstractions, they will target Python developers. If a firmware dev rants about abstractions, they will target application developers. If an electrical engineer rants about abstractions, they will target firmware developers. Drawing the line for “excessive abstraction” based on what you personally know and calling everything afterwards as “killing civilization” is quite a take.
  • wredcoll 2y ago
    God, you're right, this is almost as bad as those "well chemistry is just applied physics and physics is just applied mathematics so math is the best" nonsense that shows up every so often.
    • MonkeyClub 2y ago
      ... And math is just applied philosophy, and philosophy is just applied wine drinking. So let's drink some wine and be merry.
      • tempodox 2y ago
        I am of the firm conviction that ganja produces better philosophy than wine.
        • MonkeyClub 2y ago
          I'd expect that firm convictions are usually produced by tea- or coffee-drinking analytical philosophers, rather than by either wine or cannabis :)
          • tempodox 2y ago
            OK, in the spirit of full disclosure, I did skip over my coffee-drinking leanings :)
• tolciho 2y ago
  > I'm not a historian and will not comment on this first part of the talk. It doesn't matter much, Okay. > What is robust? ... Is it the multi-year uptimes of a plethora of ... Big uptime systems are dubious. Probably a lack of kernel patches, hardware patches, and who know if, on reboot, the system will actually boot and start the relevant services correctly. A bank once had their mainframe fail, and they were flailing around for a good long while, possibly because it had been about a decade since their last failure and everyone forgot what to do, or maybe Bob had retired. Or how about that host that boots four years into the future and now various things are quite broken? There was NTP, but an unrelated change had broken that on some firewall. "Normal Accidents" are somehow a thing in complex systems, as are black swan events. Quite possibly either or both were involved in the late bronze age whateveritwas, but naturally history doesn't matter much. > Oh, and garbage collection and functional programming aren't new abstractions. Lisp did both in the late 1950s PAIP (Norvig) recounts that the garbage collection was so bad it was turned off and the LISP machines were let run until they ran out of memory, at which point they were rebooted. I guess this is a point for improved robustness in certain areas, though there are probably still "/5 * * * reboot-something" type cron jobs out there for services that leak too much memory. No, management did not grant time to fix that service last I had to put in the most recent five minute reboot script. Many don't get such a intimate view of the rusty bowels of the internet. > open up a Unix-type command line in Linux/MacOS/*BSD/WSL, type "ed" at the prompt and see how far you get with your text editing Some wacky systems do not install ed, or link it to nano or some other nonsense, so you may need to actually install ed to get the standard editor. If you happen to be stuck on such a system, `busybox vi` is tolerable—vim gussied up with color spam is not, especially the unreadable blue on the black console—though learning enough about ed might be good if you, hypothetically, ever have to fix an old system over a serial line at 3AM in the morning. There isn't much to learn for such cases, "a" to append new lines, "." on a line by itself to end that, "/foo" to search, "c" to change that whole line (and then the "." thing) and then "wq" to save. Great for edits were you don't want other folks seeing the contents of, say, /etc/hostname.wg0. Or sometimes a cat of the file should be done to preserve it in the scrollback buffer, which has saved a non-zero number of configuration files across the internet. Ideally this sort of disaster training should be practiced by some now and then, but that does take time away from other things. Back to the unloved history thing. A collapse can take a few centuries, which may be a problem given the recent emphasis on the current sprint or how the stock will be doing Tuesday (as opposed to the lease for Hong Kong, though a hundred years is a magnificently short period of time). So a few folks crying wolf or playing Cassandra might be a good thing to help point out past issues and maybe from that future shocks can be made less bad. And of course one should beware the C people.
• Sparkyte 2y ago
  In a sense abstraction does. You stop learning the fundamentals of how something works. Long enough as time goes by no one knows how the fundamentals work and a company fails.
  • jibal 2y ago
    As the article shows, these ridiculous claims are false.
• foxes 2y ago
  Billionaires are killing civilisation
  • phendrenad2 2y ago
    How so?
• travisgriggs 2y ago
  Not all simplifications are abstractions. Not all abstractions are simplifications. But the pursuit of simplification is usually what motivates an abstraction. I don’t think that abstractions kill software, or civilization for that matter, but ill begotten abstractions in the name of short win simplifications, puts a drag on the flexibility and agility and approachability of either. Take syntactic sugar in just about any language. There’s usually a breaking point, where you can say the localized gain in simplification for this particular nuance is not worth how complex this tool (language) has become. People don’t make more mistakes in a syntax heavy language because of any particular element, but because using the tool well to solve complex problems just gets difficult (regardless of what a compiler might guarantee you). I look at the complexity that async and coroutines adds to my experience when programming anything “threaded like” in Kotlin compared to how I deal with the same sorts of problems in Elixir/Erlang and it’s just night and day difference. Both have abstractions/simplifications to the age old problem of parallel/async computing, but one (the former) just multiplies simplicities to end up with something complex again and the other has an abstraction/simplification that Just Works(tm) and really is simple.
• bionhoward 2y ago
  One reason I like Rust is it lets me replace a lot of high level Python stuff with faster and more correct code while also opening access a new world of low level C stuff I never had an opportunity to learn about, it’s been super fun to tinker with and I look forward to keep working with it! Definitely good to broaden our horizons but also crucial to maintain focus…there is so much to learn, how can we balance the joy and productivity of software with the strategic imperative to build locally grown hardware?
• rglover 2y ago
  Ill-considered abstractions, yes. There are a lot of abstractions that you can tell are the first draft or attempt but because of tech's "religion of speed"—and being drunk on hubris—end up shipping (vs being one of several iterations). Then, if those abstractions are part of a popular project, other people copy them due to mimetics (under the watery banner of "best practices"). Rinse and repeat for ~10-20 years and you have a gigantic mess on your hands. Even worse, in a hyper-social society (ironically, because of the technology), social consensus (for sake of not being found out as an "impostor") around these not-quite-there solutions just propagates them. FWIW, I love that Jonathan Blow talk and come back to it at least once per year. He doesn't say anything controversial, but deep down, I think a lot of developers know that they're not shipping their best (or guiding younger generations properly), so they get upset or feel called out. We've just reached a state of culture in which chasing novelty has become commonplace (or in some cases, celebrated). Well-considered solutions used to be a cultural standard whereas now, anything that's new (whether or not its actually good) has become the standard. We can navel gaze and nitpick the details of Blow's argument all we want, but the evidence is front and center—everywhere. And yes, over a long enough horizon, that can lead to civilizational collapse (and when you consider the amount of broken stuff in the world, arguably, already is).
• sebastianconcpt 2y ago
  This is a very interesting take but there is an underlying issue to software. An abstraction that isn't at the software libraries/system level: managerialism. The processualizing of all the things. Rudyard Lynch has a provocative interesting take on it.
• BirAdam 2y ago
  There are certainly plenty of issues with the modern software landscape, and I do think too much abstraction is a problem. Yet, the opposite extreme is also bad, and people overly romanticize the past. Not only were crashes and reboots problems, not only did Amiga and such have compatibility problems between hardware versions, but even systems that strove for compatibility suffered from incompatibilities. The fact is, even on the most unreliable modern system (Windows 11) my computer is far more reliable than any computer I had before about 2010. It can also run software written for Windows 95. That’s a very good run. A computer being usable day to day is better than one that isn’t.
• scotty79 2y ago
  > Abstraction fosters ignorance about low level programming. > If we forget low level stuff, civilization will fall apart since we won't be able to keep vital software running. There's barely anything to remember. Most of low level stuff did 180 in last 3 decades. RAM is slow now, compute is fast. Drives can be almost as fast as RAM. Sometimes it's better to do more than less to make code branchless. It's best if you can split your task into thousands of micro-threads and run on GPU.
• userbinator 2y ago
  Abstraction isn't the problem, overabstraction is; and I suspect the reason the latter is so common is because people don't actually understand why and when abstraction is useful (and likewise, when it isn't), so they blindly apply it whenever they can, with the misguided notion that since abstraction is somehow a good thing, the more abstract something is, the better it is.
• natmaka 2y ago
  IMHO part of the problem stems from teaching without carefully stating the nature of what is explained. A teacher should check that the audience reasonably knows what 'convention' means, how it differs from 'abstraction', 'truth', 'theory', 'measured fact'... Bonus: explicitly recognizing that many terms (along with other conventions) aren't adequate. According to the knowledge of those who coined them they appeared adequate at the time, and replacing them may induce confusions, would condemn existing knowledge and writings, and isn't perfectly effective as the new convention may even prove inadequate later. I used to say that we may consider them as tributes to the the wonderful people who coined them.
• jppope 2y ago
  In a sense, I wrote an article about this exact thing: https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/4000years/ https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/4000years/ While fun to talk about, there really isn't a danger
• paul_h 2y ago
  Killing or just another risk? As far back as the 80's or 70's there was the idea of losing ball bearing manufacture capability as a risk to society and civilization. I'd think the lack of a systemic defence to amplified mis and dis info is might higher in a list, with application of another software abstraction (merkle trees) being part of the solution. Well, defence of rule of law perhaps and less about layered technological aspects of civilization.
• illiac786 2y ago
  Abstraction is a way to move work onto machines to make us humans more productive (at least that’s the plan). Machines do insane amount of useless (ok, highly inefficient) work to allow us to save some brain effort. Sure, some abstractions are counterproductive and add to complexity rather than making it easier for us. I’d argue it’s a minority though.
• alecco 2y ago
  The problem is confusing the collapse of the Western civilization and civilization per se. China is very happy to pick up the pieces. In spite of their cultural weaknesses, on this point they do teach and learn how to do everything from scratch. The West as a dominant civilization is absolutely collapsing. It's just a matter of how long will it take. I hope China learns from our mistakes and has the will to fix their cultural shortcomings.
  • SirHumphrey 2y ago
    But is it though? Because it's has been claimed for many many years that the west if falling (at least from 2008 on-wards) and yet - more people speak English than ever before, American culture (at least anecdotally) is more ever present and American tech corporations are 8 out of 10 most valuable companies in the world. I guess that people always feel that the end is nigh.
    • deleted 2y ago
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    • alecco 2y ago
      Latin was used for centuries after the Roman empire was gone. The West is de-industrializing very fast. And a good chunk of the services side is switching to India and other cheaper countries and AI. The West is in its last legs. The final nails in the coffin will be when China achieves good enough but at cheap prices: 1) chips (5-10 years away) and 2) aerospace (8-12 years away?). China is investing heavily on these and acquiring the knowledge (wink-wink).
• greybox 2y ago
  You make some very good points here. I've watched the talk too and criticism of it is important. I have to say though Blow is right when he says: "you can't just Draw pixels to the screen" I am a game engine programmer at a 'medium sized' games company and it is becoming VERY difficult to hire anyone to work on graphics code. DX12 (and others of the same generation) is a massive step up from what previous generations (DX11) used to demand of the programmer. Doing anything at all with these APIs is a massive task and by Microsoft's own admission (I can't find the quote from the docs anymore, citation needed), DX12 is extremely difficult to learn without experience with previous graphics APIs. I see a lot of people using the argument: "but these APIs are only for developers that want to really push the limits of what the graphics card can do, and want to implement very low level optimizations." and that's partially true. But it's now the industry standard and it's nigh-on unteachable to anyone without previous experience. Unless something changes, the hiring pool is going to continue to decrease in size.
  • ignoramous 2y ago
    > Unless something changes, the hiring pool is going to continue to decrease in size. Or, we'll see the return of "trainees"?
  • coffeeaddict1 2y ago
    I agree with your point, but DX12 went in the opposite direction of abstraction: it's a much lower level API than the highly abstracted OpenGL.
    • GuestHNUser 2y ago
      Yet these "lower-level" APIs, DX12 and Vulcan, often don't significantly out perform DX11, and in many cases DX11 performs better. I put lower-level in quotes because those APIs bake assumptions about the hardware into their API which shouldn't be there to begin with because they frequently prevent drivers from getting the most out of the hardware.
  • pjfin123 2y ago
    Blow's talk made me realize I'm not crazy when I get frustrated about basic things being incredibly difficult. Drawing a button to the screen when you want to build a software application has become so difficult that most people just use a progressive web app which is 100x slower than is possible. Are the best options for GUI applications in 2025 really Java Swing and Qt?
• DarkNova6 2y ago
  „ If we forget low level stuff, civilization will fall apart since we won't be able to keep vital software running.“ I argue the other way around. There is too mich complexity involved with using low level systems to model high level processes. We use the wrong tools and often model our system in a way which mimics the initial dataflow instead of discovering our domain and have a higher level understanding. Complexity kills. And we must do everything in our power ti keep complexity to its minimum and avoid accidental complexity.
  • ignoramous 2y ago
    > And we must do everything in our power to keep complexity to its minimum and avoid accidental complexity. We aren't avoiding nor minimising complexity (by being at higher levels) but merely being ignorant of it, which is okay, too; until the abstractions leak: For example, folks working in hpc / cybersecurity have no such luxury.
    • DarkNova6 2y ago
      You are right, I should have been more accurate in my depiction. Inherently technological problems require low level-technological solutions. There is no way around that. But most complexity I see arrives from just moving data from A to B to automate everyday bureaucratic tasks or enable data analysis. And the needless complexity I encounter in such systems is just mind boggling. Currently I am working on a government system which captures tasks for long running procedures such as approving power plants. And the way the devs are treating this system is borderline criminal, acting as if this is just another CRUD app without any structure or architecture.
    • lmm 2y ago
      The idea that abstractions have to leak is a myth. We don't need fewer abstractions, just better ones. Abstractions that don't require obscuring the low-level details (e.g. typeclass/trait systems instead of interface/impl ones) help too.
      • lelanthran 2y ago
• mexicocitinluez 2y ago
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• deterministic 2y ago
  There will always be youngsters who love to dive into machine code and low-level stuff. And there will always be a need for developers who can code low-level efficient device drivers, game engines etc. So software abstractions is not something I worry about when it comes to the survival of civilization. Nukes seems to be more of a real threat IMHO.
• frozenlettuce 2y ago
  No need to worry: there are amazing optimizations happening in the software and hardware world, but outside the US - unless you don't consider these places as being part of "Civilization"