Hacker News Reader

Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

Because abstractions are slow. Abstractions are harder for new people to learn from scratch. Abstractions hide necessary details when bug-triaging. Abstractions hand-cuff you into a certain way of thinking about things, a certain way of doing things.

Agreed. For example, you should never use anything above assembly, and especially not high-level languages like C++, Haskell or JavaScript, which are filled with abstractions. Those are fine for prototyping, but for production you should switch to good ol' NASM, only making calls to libraries when appropriate.

View on HN

Assembly!? Kids these days! I start with a fresh copy of the universe everyday for all my coding needs.

No, you're missing the point. Frameworks are abstractions the author doesn't like. Languages are abstractions the author is fine with so they aren't frameworks.

There's a really great metaphor for how to manage complexity in abstraction.

We're all familiar with spaghetti code--you know, functional flow that winds its way through the source files and ends up in a big tangle.

"Aha!" we say, "This is awful, let's fix it."

So, we build all these layers of abstraction, with the hope that we can swap out any layer at random and things will be fine. This is lasagna code, and ends up being a gooey mess whenever you try to change a layer--you can always add layers, mind you, but actually removing one in the middle can prove to be quite messy.

The fix is ravioli code: Little self-contained bits of code with small, well-defined boundaries and implementations well-isolated from the outside world only communicating through messages.

The author does make a valid point, though: debugging through lots of abstractions is kind of a pain in the neck, and depending on the app a bunch of custom concrete code can be a lot simpler to maintain.

That's the siren song, though...that code is much easier to deal with until it isn't and then you're screwed.

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/378/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com