>For someone new to the codebase who knows nothing of the giant abstraction, which do you think is easier to grasp: 10 lines of code that only make sense if you know the abstraction, or 20 or 100 lines of code that can be understood on their own?
The "only make sense if you know the abstraction" part seems to have it backwards. The point of the abstraction is to _not_ have to know what's being abstracted away. The problem is that with Java (which Go was being compared to here), abstractions often times aren't exactly abstracting away anything. "Abstraction" has basically come to mean "use objects because they have getters and setters!" and other things like that, which give very little benefit in general. Nine times out of ten, they do make the code more complex, because their abstractions come either at too low a level (abstract away simple functions but require the code on the outside to implement everything and reinvent the wheel) or too high a level (abstract away all operations so that no creativity is possible with this). So as a solution to the "abstraction" problem, Go does it right, but something like Rust (which doesn't try (too hard) to be like C, Java, etc.) can do an even better job at this by entirely changing the meaning of "abstraction".
The "only make sense if you know the abstraction" part seems to have it backwards. The point of the abstraction is to _not_ have to know what's being abstracted away. The problem is that with Java (which Go was being compared to here), abstractions often times aren't exactly abstracting away anything. "Abstraction" has basically come to mean "use objects because they have getters and setters!" and other things like that, which give very little benefit in general. Nine times out of ten, they do make the code more complex, because their abstractions come either at too low a level (abstract away simple functions but require the code on the outside to implement everything and reinvent the wheel) or too high a level (abstract away all operations so that no creativity is possible with this). So as a solution to the "abstraction" problem, Go does it right, but something like Rust (which doesn't try (too hard) to be like C, Java, etc.) can do an even better job at this by entirely changing the meaning of "abstraction".