[ef4]

No, it's not a true statement. It's fundamentally wrong. Because if abstraction is dangerous, we should all be laying out transistors by hand instead of writing code.

People get so comfortable with their familiar abstractions that they forget they're still abstractions.

Taking the article as an example, even his "less abstracted" examples are absurdly abstract, and I doubt anybody here can really say for sure how they work completely, underneath all the abstractions. That's a good thing, because it lets us get things done and express ideas in hardware-independent ways.

[Bahamut]

Abstractions are dangerous - if you abstract wrong, your code is potentially worse than the unabstracted version since it is easy to impose an abstraction where there is none, but a poorly abstracted component is harder to correct.

[aikah]

ANYTHING done wrong can be dangerous,abstraction or not. The problem isn't abstraction but "poor code",whatever it means. spec writers chose to go with the DOM,which is a poor API and it led to things like DHTML because DOM just sucked. It was clearly not made for what devs are doing with the web today,thus the need to abstract a bad API with a framework or a library.

I bet you don't write web apps adding DOM nodes to the DOM document.You're already using an abstraction if you're using any DHTML api.But you didn't know that.