Comment by eyelidlessness 4 days ago
This is such a weirdly contrarian take. You’re basically saying that everything in context is terrible, and somehow at the same time, on the same basis, that it’s wrong to critique anything because everything is terrible.
That’s certainly a logically consistent position, but it isn’t one that allows much room for anything to improve… or even become a productive discussion.
The critique was that the existing abstractions address the same set of problems as do the newly introduced abstractions. You’ve said that the existing abstractions are bad, as an invalidation of that critique.
It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether something for convenience adds value to something also for convenience.
Nearly everything in any high level language isn’t strictly necessary to achieve general purpose computation. That doesn’t invalidate any distinction between all higher level concepts! They specifically add expressiveness, so it’s eminently meaningful—for people who find expressiveness valuable—to discuss and distinguish between like solutions in those terms.
I never said any of this is bad. I said it is completely unnecessary. Those are different. I also said the blind reliance on that unnecessary stuff is foolish. Like you said it is all about convenience, which is exceedingly shallow and faulty.
> They specifically add expressiveness
Not really. Expressiveness is the ability to achieve the same end state in different ways. How do you then determine that? You have to count the different ways a given thing is achieved. Under the abstraction if its doing the same thing in the same way as something else then its not really different, and thus not expressive. That is why these large SPA frameworks have wildly different super large APIs, but their output is strikingly similar, which isn't expressive at all. Really, with these tools none of that matters, because its really just about the perceptions of convenience.
You’re right but arguing with the “add another dependency” people is a waste of time. This just isn’t really a software engineering community.
No, I am saying don't complain about something only because its an abstraction when likely the person making that comment cannot program without vanity abstractions. Clearly, this is about bias and preference. At the very least people could be consistent in their reasoning.