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Layers of abstraction make complex tasks more reachable by a larger number of programmers by reducing the amount of specialist knowledge about those lower layers required to do the job. The more layers of abstraction you have, the less they have to worry about lower levels and can just get on with what they want to do.

Sometimes this is certainly true, but I think when it comes to abstraction layers, people tend to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the costs. Lately I've been thinking a lot about Joel's Law of Leaky Abstractions.

20 years ago we had native UI toolkits that were fast and responsive, relatively simple to program against, and yielded a common design language that was shared across all the apps on a given OS. Now we have monstrosities like Electron that are bulky and slow, yield non-native UIs across the board, and require programmers to understand a whole mess of technologies and frameworks to use effectively.

I mean, sure, now you don't have to rewrite your web code to build a desktop app, but don't get me started on the utter quagmire that is modern web development. These days it feels like software development has an infection, and instead of carving out the infection and letting it heal, we just keep piling more and more bandaids on top of it.

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