L' Eomot Inversé (9/26/2013)
The idea that abstraction is a bad idea is just plain crazy. Abstraction is one of the main tools for reducing a problem into multiple smaller parts. Simple advanced programming concepts like reduction, function mapping, and unification are going to cause far less damage that hideous primitve complexity like C++'s Friend concept.
Abstraction is good when used appropriately, but all too often I find myself debugging a rediculously simple piece of logic that could have been written in 10 lines of code that someone has somehow turned into 1000 lines of services, factories, handlers, delegates, extensions, overrides and god knows what else. I trace it through the 17 layers of junk only to find that it has done "x = a + b" instead of "x = a * b".
Such elementary bugs would never occur if the logic was not obscured by vast amounts of unnecessary abstraction.
This is not directly the fault of the programming language, as programmers do not have to use these techniques, but the fact that so much emphasis is placed on learning "advanced" programming concepts seems to make a lot of new programmers think they should be using the advanced concepts all the time.
Personally, I would like to see more computer scientists working on ways to prevent unnecessary complexity, e.g. automatic compiler warnings when the amount of wrapper code exceeds some multiple of worker code.
Simon