[Agingcoder]

This is interesting. I think though that the first option eventually leaks though, and that (unfortunately) you will have to spend time debugging things, sometimes at great cost for really sophisticated abstractions. The tradeoff, and the tipping point are clearly not obvious though!

[tikhonj]

You can't get away from some debugging, but I've certainly seen massive differences in how much debugging I've had to do between different codebases!

[Agingcoder]

This is a very interesting discussion. I agree with you. I’m an application developer but I’ve had to debug what I consider to be very hard issues ( network driver bugs, kernel bugs, compiler bugs, hardware bugs, etc ), every time in what I thought to be perfect aabstractions. I mean, the compiler should compile properly, the kernel shouldn’t lie, and my memory stick should behave. The thing is, it eventually fails. So I have a maybe abnormally high level of appreciation for debuggable systems :-)