Conveying Nuance

And so they get taught to the new generation. But if the new generation doesn’t understand the trade offs and the reasons they came to these conclusions, they don’t have the context to decide when it’s actually a bad idea and how far can you stretch this. So they run into their own problems from trying to take these best practices and anti-patterns to extreme. And so they teach the next generation. And maybe this is just you can’t break out of this loop and it’s just bound to happen over and over again, which is maybe fine.

I think one way to try to break this loop is just when we teach something to the next generation, we shouldn’t just be two-dimensional and say here’s best practices and anti-patterns. But we should try to explain what is it that you’re actually trading away. What are the benefits and what are the costs of this idea? And so when we talk about the benefits of abstraction, of course it has benefits. The whole computer is a huge stack of abstractions. And I think concrete benefits are—abstractions let you focus on a specific intent, right? So if you have this thing and they have to keep it all in their head.¹