Why black boxes are important | Hacker News Reader

Why black boxes are important

philosophyinpractice.substack.com

10 pointsstephencarr_4 comments

I agree to some extent, though there is a point to make about going with the basics first. React isn’t really a Blackbox, it‘s mostly written in plain old TypeScript and the internals don’t really do anything you couldn’t write yourself. What you should do however is rather than starting with a big framework like React as a beginner, start out with the absolute basics in plain JS. Learn how the language works, learn to manipulate the DOM yourself. Then, when you understand the basics, you can start appreciating what React does for you and understand (to some extent) how the underlying systems work.

Where I agree though is that you don’t have to learn all the basics before you can proceed. I’ve been writing frontend code in for about six years now and I catch myself learning something new about browsers, web infrastructure and JavaScript itself nearly every day.

All this is to say, don’t be afraid to both start at the beginning and understand the basics, and skip ahead a few chapters and try new things and learn as you go.

Did you mean _encapsulation_?

React and Django are not black boxes. The source is all there, and their interfaces often reflect their internal workings. You know the insides but you are not meant to poke around.

Even if the source is all there, it's not like you are really looking at it. Functionally it's same as a black box if you treat it that way.

It's not just about the source. Frameworks are leaky abstractions by design, they intentionally expose their internals.

In Django, for example, you are supposed to know what kind of queries it generates. It is documented how queries are generated (an exposed internal).

You have to open it to configure it:

    DATABASES = {
        "default": {
            "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.postgresql",
        }
    }

And by doing so, you have to acknowledge (in this case) that postgres becomes a known component of the "insides" (even though you are supposed to only interact with the ORM).

A black box doesn't need this kind of stuff. It would have an embedded database instead. Like a plane black box would have its own batteries instead of relying on the plane power supply.

This is all good, I'm all in favor of good clear boundaries between components. The existence of a boundary does not make it a black box though.

That's why I would prefer using the term "encapsulation" when describing the advantages of having an abstraction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com