Have you ever noticed that everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac, and everyone who drives slower than you is a moron? I think code abstraction fits a similar pattern.
Sortaaaa, it’s definitely harder to read existing code than it is to write new code, which is what you’re getting at. To bend your analogy a little further, we can all identify the person on the road who was clearly wrong, putting us all in danger. It’s the difference between someone slowing down traffic by camping in the fast late and someone else barreling down a residential street 50 mph over the limit. The former is annoying, the latter struck and killed someone.
If they drive faster than me, then godspeed. Let them safely pass me and then swiftly disappear into the horizon, hopefully not before I manage to learn a couple badass driver tricks from them.
If they drive slower then yeah they're morons and I need to pass them as soon as humanly possible.
In both cases they become non-factors and I can drive in peace. The fast disappear into the horizon and the slow get left behind. This plays out until I am alone in the road and no longer need to consider the actions of other humans behind the wheel. That is when peace is achieved. Sadly it does not last long.
> hopefully not before I manage to learn a couple badass driver tricks from them.
I mean they're probably tailgating and aggressively changing lanes and don't have any awareness of the dangers of differential velocity between lanes of traffic. I don't think you really need to learn those 'tricks'.
You can still freely let them go and they can give any bored cops ahead of you something to do though.
I wonder if I'm witnessing the birth of yet another Hacker News thought terminating cliche.
There is a place and time for everything. You can drive as fast as you can in a Formula 1 race, but when you're around pedestrians you gotta slow down.
Similarly, complex abstractions can often be fast to write but difficult to maintain. Similar to a lack of them.
But sure, it all has a time and place. Except the attitude of dismissing or never discussing this topic. That's the only thing that is "wrong" here.
The gist of it was: "This specific thing makes my job difficult, please be mindful of people like me" is just personal experience.
The comment even contains the word "please" in it. And they even acknowledge that it solves other problems.
But it's a bit shitty to dismiss someone's personal experience and plea by mocking with exaggerated quotes from a comedian, just because you happen to disagree with them.
> The senior engineer who introduced the thing like this inevitably leaves and nobody cares to learn some bespoke abstraction enough to keep using it.
They seem to be saying that this inevitably happens and to never use the abstraction. They may have inserted a "please" in there to try to make it superficially appear softer, but they aren't actually being very nuanced at all.
Not that code is this serious at all. Idk.