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Comment by brundolf

You've got a very narrow view that I'd encourage you to be more open-minded about

No abstraction is perfect. Every abstraction, when encountered by a user, requires them to ask "what does this do?", because they don't have the implementation in front of their eyes

This may be an easy question to answer- maybe it maps very obviously to a pattern or domain concept they already know, or maybe they've seen this exact abstraction before and just have to recall it

It may be slightly harder- a new but well-documented concept, or a concept that's intuitive but complex, or a concept that's simple but poorly-named

Or it may be very hard- a badly-designed abstraction, or one that's impossible to understand without understanding the entire system

But the simplest, most elegant, most intuitive abstraction in the world has nonzero cognitive cost. We abstract despite the cost, when that cost is smaller than the cost of not abstracting.

parent brundolf 3 years ago

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