So true and yet, we have all those crazy JavaScript frameworks trying to abstract everything away from developers. There's a lesson in there.
From the javascript frameworks - I use only backbone and jquery - first as a simple router, second for easy dom traversal.
This is so true. You can, however, successfully abstract away a bunch of boilerplate for common actions, and enforcing patterns. The key to a framework (and skill of the developer), is knowing when and how to avoid the abstractions.
Believing you're somehow avoiding abstraction because you only use a couple of additional libraries on top of JS and the DOM is like insisting on a 99th storey apartment instead of an 100th storey one, because you prefer being close to the ground.
You can by all means argue that all the big JS frameworks are poor abstractions. But a sweeping statement like "you cannot abstract away complexity" completely ignores the fact that web development as a field is only possible because of the successful abstraction of huge quantities of complexity.
Similarly, since with web browsers we get what we get, we might as well consider that our reasonable base for web development, it's not like anyone is going to do that part differently any time soon.
The browser severely limits what you're able to do with the network connection, but at the end of the day dealing with the network is a complex beast.
If you doubt, look no further than the HTML5 caching API's. The tooling around them is absolutely terrible, but even if it weren't there's an inherent complexity with that sort of thing.
Often it's also a question of how things are composed, not just how much they're abstracted away. If you're use case dictates that you need to separately control something that's been composed into one thing then you're usually out of luck
No, you have a selection bias, you don't notice the abstractions that have worked.
Oh sure you can. It just costs something. The most common tradeoff is that you abstract away complexity in favor of performance.
that makes no sense.
Perhaps what you meant is that there is a limit to how much a problem can be simplified.