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Comment by ulisesrmzroche | Hacker News Reader

Look, if you actually understood what an abstraction means, you and the rest of these guys (JoelsSpolsky, I'm looking at you) wouldn't even be pulling the "mightier than thou REAL PROGRAMMER" argument.

You know what debugging is? It's patching up the leaks in abstractions. Thus, we all think about what's behind the abstraction pretty much every working day.

Ya'll soap-boxing is annoying the fuck out of me.

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Sounds like you have had a bad day, so I won't hold this too much against you.

I suggest you not take all of this so personally.

Have you read the lecture that okal posted the link to? It's from the early 1970's and speaks to the early days of when abstractions were first being implemented for computers in general. Perhaps it is you who does not understand what abstraction means.

It's not that I had a bad day, is that you used the age-old "REAL PROGRAMMER" argument, which is and remains, annoying since the 70's.

Me? I write in machine code – in 'raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.

http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

I was not saying there is such a thing as a "real programmer." I am not sure where you're getting that from. I was merely attempting to spur some debate surrounding the recent trends towards very superficial "innovations" being put forth by many on Hacker News. I am not saying I have the answers to any of these questions. And, I don't think I am better than anyone for thinking a particular way. I just want to learn and try to understand the world around me. That's it.

What makes you think you can't be truly innovative by using somebody else's construction? There are new things to be done by building off of somebody else's work or by starting from the ground up. If you attempt the latter, you can almost be sure that your work will be less fruitful, unless you have some truly unique perspective.

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