[weitendorf]

I personally don’t understand what you are arguing for. While I agree that problems can be too abstracted or that bad abstractions abound, I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion at all. You’ll also literally never fix this problem because millions of people produce software, and you’re bound to disagree with some of them, and they’ll never all be as skilled as you. So my only interpretation of this post is that you think we should have even higher standards for constitutes an acceptable abstraction than is the norm already.

That’s easy to say writ large but I think if you examine specific areas you consider “too abstracted” you might find it a humbling experience. Most likely, there are very good reasons for those “over abstractions”, and the engineers working in those areas also find the abstraction situation hairy (but necessary or unreasonable to fix).

For example, a lot of software is built by providing a good abstraction on top of a widely used or accepted middle abstraction (eg Kubernetes on Linux + container runtimes + the traditional control plane:config layer:dataplane architecture). All that logic could all be implemented directly in a new OS, but that introduces compatability issues with users (you can build it, but you may have no users) unless you reimplement the bad abstractions you were trying to avoid. And, that kind of solution is way, way, way harder to implement. I personally want to solve this problem because I hate Kubernetes’ design, but see it purely as a consequence of doing things the “right way” being so absurdly difficult and/or expensive that it’s just not worth it.

[znkr]

Indeed, its tradeoffs all the way down