Comment by cloogshicer

I've long been having a hunch that we're currently in the "wild west of abstraction".

I think we're missing an essential constraint on the way we do abstraction.

My hunch is that this constraint should be that abstractions must be reversible.

Here's an example: When you use a compiler, you can work at a higher layer of abstraction (the higher-level language). But, this means you're now locked into that layer of abstraction. By that I mean, you can no longer work at the lower layer (assembly), even if you wanted to. You could in theory of course modify the compiler output after it's been generated, but then you'd have to somehow manually keep that work in sync whenever you want to re-generate. Using an abstraction kinda locks you into that layer.

I see this problem appearing everywhere:

- Use framework <--> Write from scratch

- Use an ORM <--> Write raw SQL

- Garbage collection <--> Manual memory management

- Using a DSL <--> Writing raw language code

- Cross platform UI framework <--> Native UI code

- ...

I think we're missing a fundamental primitive of abstraction that allows us to work on each layer of abstraction without being locked in.

If you have any thoughts at all on this, please share them here!