One simple example from everyday life: Imagine that you don’t have in your vocabulary notion of a sum. Therefore, if you would like to tell someone to do a sum

One simple example from everyday life: Imagine that you don’t have in your vocabulary notion of a sum. Therefore, if you would like to tell someone to do a sum of some things you would always have to express the process of summation in details instead of just telling and then you sum these numbers. I hear this a lot to explain the idea of abstraction to people, but the trouble with applying it to software is that picking really good abstractions is very, very very hard. Abstractions evolve over a long time under pressure of peer review and evolution of software systems. It took us ~2000 years to get a solid foundation for mathematical concepts and notation (we understood sum way before that, but you get the idea). We don't have 2000 years to pick really good abstractions for software systems. I'm convinced that a programming language must be really good at allowing you to change and evolve your programs as quickly as possible as your understanding of abstractions improves. This is far more important than more powerful ways to describe abstractions IMO. Functions are fine. Just let me change things drastically without breaking too much or having to rewrite half the darned thing, and I'll be happy.