Abstraction is bad (so it'd better be justified)

This is not a very deep or new idea, but I like to spell it out as so:

"Abstraction", by itself, as a word, is bad. Think about it: when something is "abstract" it means it's harder to understand, less connected to the tangible day-to-day things we use, somewhat disconnected from reality. So if abstraction truly means that, then it's obviously bad. However, it often has good things as part of the trade-off (because that's exactly what it is, a trade-off).

Technically, it's just a word, and words are what we make them. It's not like that the fact that "abstraction" as a word is bad prescribes abstraction in programming to be bad, but it's also not a random sound, and the word does convey something about the concept itself in practice.

The "action item" so to say is that it is helpful to think of abstraction as bad to make sure that if you're abstracting something away, it brings concrete benefit. This is particularly useful to a certain type of math-y programmers, such as me (i guess this serves mostly as a personal reminder 🌚).