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Discussion on: Does your website really need to be larger than Windows 95?

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Alain Van Hout

That's the thing with abstractions: they have their costs, but at the same time they reduce the effort of resolving lower-level problems which enables us to address higher-level problems.

Computers as a concept work like this:

  • we create devices to do calculations in a mechanical way, so we don't have to do it manually
  • we reduce the mechanics to electron movements so that we need to move less stuff around
  • we created bytecode so that we don't need to manually move electrons around
  • we created low-level languages so that we don't need to manually create our bytecode all the time
  • we created high-level languages so we don't need to continuously think about memory allocation and memory management, and can instead direct our capacity for cognitive load towards logic and architecture
  • we created libraries, so that that we can substract lower-level logic from our cognitive load and focus more on higher-level architecture
  • we created frameworks, so that we can substract boilerplate higher-level logic from our cognitive load and focus more on business-specific architecture