> The one-time cost of learning a good abstraction is strictly less than the ongoing cost of understanding and then continually reimplementing it by hand.
There is a danger of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy here - it's easy to define a "good" abstraction as one that is worth the one-time cost of learning it.
So, given that there are both "good" and "bad" abstractions in every language, is the net gain from learning them all greater than the cognitive effort of having to learn them all?
I'd argue that no, it's not. Absolutely reducing the total number of abstractions in the language reduces the cognitive load of working in that language, even if it requires us to be more verbose.
I look on it as falling out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power. When I see reuse of an abstraction I know not only what it does but what it doesn't do. If I skip that and start writing custom code, well, that code could do anything at all so everyone has to continually reread it carefully. I find poring over tedious boilerplate to be a waste of precious lifetime compared to learning better building blocks.
There is a danger of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy here - it's easy to define a "good" abstraction as one that is worth the one-time cost of learning it.
So, given that there are both "good" and "bad" abstractions in every language, is the net gain from learning them all greater than the cognitive effort of having to learn them all?
I'd argue that no, it's not. Absolutely reducing the total number of abstractions in the language reduces the cognitive load of working in that language, even if it requires us to be more verbose.