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by protobluffers 5023 days ago
The more abstraction you shove down the programmer's throat, the less he will understand what's really going on behind the scenes. Eventually the abstractions become more of an impediment than a panacea, e.g. when you try to do simple things. And we also end up with the creation of "leaky abstractions", since programmers who create them have developed a love for abstraction (what might contribute to that?) but little understanding of the lower levels.

There was a recent post on HN regarding /usr/local that seemed to suggest some programmers do not understand what a partition is nor should they need to become acquainted with such unimportant details. I hope I'm wrong in that interpretation. Because if true, that is just sad.