1. Jun 14th, 2006

    Can you abstract too much?

    Apparently you can, at least according to this scray stack trace, posted by Peter Thomas.
    Too many abstractions. You can imagine what the performance is like.

    And no, I’m not talking about CPU or memory. Non-recursive stacks don’t eat up that much. It’s the bandwidth I waste every time I weed through impossibly huge stack traces to find a bug. You can’t expand that bandwidth with cheap hardware from Fry’s.

    Huge stack traces are also typical of overly complicated code that has too much going on. And again, it’s not how much CPU and memory it eats, but how much time you spend trying to work with the code.

    It’s interesting how a language that does minimalism so brilliantly leads, a decade later, to the exact opposite. Isn’t it time we find better metrics and principles for developing in Java?

    Printable PDF | Posted by Assaf Filed in general 2 Comments »

    1. Jun 15th, 2006

      ryan king

      Part of the challenge with Java’s minimalism is that it only provides one method (pun intended) for dealing with and creating abstractions.

    2. Jun 16th, 2006

      Assaf

      Maybe it’s not the language itself, but the ecosystem that emerged around it.

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