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Comment by Moru | Hacker News Reader

We certainly need abstractions for the first layer of the hardware. An abstraction of the abstraction can be useful if the first abstraction is very bad or very crude. But we are now at an abstraction of an abstraction x 8 or so. It's starting to get a bit over the top.

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I disgree with your sentiment. One thing that is constant in my experience as a computer programmer, there are always "old" computer programmers complaining that there are too many abstractions.

You cannot see any way in which we run out of possible abstraction layers? I think in the past we have assumed that was natural language, but I think natural language is a pretty poor programming language. What people actually want when they say that, is for someone to read all the nuance out of their mind and codify it.

I don't think we actually have been abstracting new layers over the past day 5-10 years anyway. Most of what I see is moving sideways, not up the stack. Covering more breadth not height or depth, of abstractions.

    > Most of what I see is moving sideways, not up the stack. Covering more breadth not height or depth, of abstractions.

I don't follow your logic. This comment is so vague. Do you have a specific example?

There are not many languages that for example abstract higher than C# and compile down to it. And whilst we are building abstractions in C# (etc) those are one step up (height), and then there are many of those frameworks, thus many steps sideways (breadth)

We only run out of abstraction once there is stagnation and time to really bake.

As long as some new thing is being invented in our industry, a new abstraction will be needed because the old one just can’t quite flex enough while being backwards compatible.

One problem is that we're building abstractions on top of older abstractions when that isn't most efficient. Suppose we write an HTTP server that can call CGI programs. Then we implement PHP as a CGI program. Then we write a Lua interpreter in PHP. Then we write our website in Lua.

Some of those levels are useful. Some of them are redundant. We should embed a Lua interpreter in our webserver and delete two levels of abstraction.

(I'm not aware of any actual Lua interpreter written in PHP, but it's representative of the kinds of stacks that do exist out there)

Only really relevant if the efficiency is valuable but yeah totally. It’s not just about new abstractions on top of the stack but also new abstractions that replace the middle and bottom of the stacks.

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