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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Well, you are referring to Wheeler's Corollary to Lampson's Law, but it doesn't have to be like that. It's actually less work to just write the program you want in the base language, than trying to shoehorn it into a framework, or wrestle the framework around your code.

I've recently rediscovered the joy of writing GEM apps in m68k ASM...

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For people's information:

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." - Butler Lampson

And, from what limited sources I could find:

"[above] ... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection" - David Wheeler

It's a shame Wheeler isn't better known. He invented the subroutine back in the '50s. Calling a subroutine used to be called a "Wheeler jump" (relevant to #4 in TFA).

His group with the EDSAC did some absolutely tremendous and groundbreaking work.

Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill wrote a book, "Preparation of programs for an electronic digital computer", that pretty much describes the core software engineering precepts we use today - in 1951.

Gill wrote "The Diagnosis of Mistakes in Programmes on the EDSAC", which gives a good snip of what they were doing at the time. I think that it can be obtained for free online.

We need to educate people that there was computing before the advent of Web 2.0. There are riches in the past to be mined by those who will take their blindfolds off.

As a sysadmin, I used to abhor levels of abstraction. As a new dev, I love it. Esp after I started using jquery. :)

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