[hutzlibu]

"the low level stuff is just conveniently hidden or abstracted away. "

Yes. This this is exactly what I want.

When I write an engine or framework, I will deal with low level stuff. But for basic tasks, I don't want to. But I have to, even where it would not be necessary.

"But the long textual code that makes the button work, eventually exists somewhere in there."

Also there exists even longer textual or even binary code that makes the code for the button work, etc. etc., but I still do not want to deal with it on a daily base. When I make an button, it should be as simple as possible.

Where is it positioned. How is it styled. Where is the onclick method to handle it. Those 3 things I want to do with simple clicks in the IDE.

Everything else is only distracting.

[Ygg2]

> Yes. This this is exactly what I want.

But the more abstract you go, the less efficient does your editor become. And speed of development goes down. It's not a simple - just put more abstraction.

[hutzlibu]

"It's not a simple - just put more abstraction."

Of course not. It is about the right level of abstraction.

Abstracting all the details away, I do not need to accomplish the task at hand.

If done right, this also will not slow things down, rather the opposite. Imagine programming a button in assembler and opengl. There you have all the details (and power). But chances are, you will be way slower and with a worse result, because you have to focus on other details and not on the task at hand.

[salawat]

Stop. Abstraction is not a magic pill that absolves you of the need to know wtf you are doing.

At best, it allows you to defer the deeper reading for a time. You might not even have to do the deeper reading for this piece of functionality, but the time will come when you have to figure out where an impedance mismatch is.

This quest for abstraction is the most infantile attitude I straw to squash in ever developer I meet. If you aren't reading the code that your code depends on to work, you have no idea what you're actually doing.

[hutzlibu]

"Stop. Abstraction is not a magic pill that absolves you of the need to know wtf you are doing."

Erm, a beginner who wants to place a button that calls his defined method foo, really does not need to know about all the framework details to get the job done.

When I was a beginner, I was happy that I could place a button and link it with whatever with ease and it worked!

I simply did not needed to know about event loops, rendering algorithms, or internals of the framework. Now I happen to know quite a lot about it, because I designed a UI framework from scratch to solve a custom need.

But most use cases with UI are to display text, images and give text input and buttons. Ordinary programmers should be able to do that, without having to learn the graphic stack. Thats why we have frameworks. They just could be easier with better tooling.