>For someone new to the codebase who knows nothing of the giant abstraction, which do you think is easier to grasp: 10 lines of code that only make sense if you know the abstraction, or 20 or 100 lines of code that can be understood on their own?

I'll take those 10 lines of code.

We've only managed to build powerful systems because of ever increasing abstractions.

See Alan Kay's DSL research for example: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf

It's not like every system with abstractions has to be done the Java way. Functional programming, be it Haskell or Lisp etc, has tons of abstrations too, and they don't get in the way.

I'd say Java's issue wasn't abstractions per se, but uneeded abstractions, BS boilerplate and needless ceremony. Which Golang also suffers from.

Besides, you don't just dispose of the abstractions and get the same, but now straightforward, code. You get rid of them and get 10x the code (the 100 lines compared to 10 he mentions), which you have to keep track of and keep in your head, only now you don't have high level abstractions to help you in that, you have to do it manually.

(And of course Go vs Python is not a good comparison, as Python's lack of types make it difficult to reason about large programs quickly. How about Go vs C#/Swift/D etc? I'd take Swift any day of the week.