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akoboldfryingtoday at 12:34 AM1 replyview on HN

I think it mostly happens because a little bit of abstraction is nearly always uncontroversially good. If you want to print a line of text 5 times, you'll instinctively write a for loop to do it, instead of copy-pasting the original print() statement an extra 4 times. The cognitive overhead upon reading this code is near zero, since we're all so familiar with it. This is abstraction, nonetheless.

So a little bit is always good, and more is sometimes very good -- even memorably good. Together these cause many of us to extrapolate too far, but for understandable reasons.


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