The CPU does not care about your abstractions. Abstractions are entirely wrt the human dealing with them. A good abstraction is only “good” with respect to some context/purpose—there is no such thing as a universally/generally good abstraction. And often a “great” abstraction will hurt your performance — so then is it so great?<p>But setting aside performance concerns, when we speak of a “good” abstraction we are usually (or should be) saying this is good for some <i>purpose</i>—good for readability, for example.<p>But even better—or of utmost importance in the real world-is this: is the abstraction under question “good for business”? And that is entirely asking this: does the abstraction allow for rapidly <i>acting</i> on business ideas, creativity, needs, etc.<p>However, I believe that once the context is fixed/agreed upon, that there is an objective answer to which of this or that abstraction is better. However experience in the practical world of today’s software development painfully has shown me that the “better” abstractions are harder to come by...and when “found”, don’t tend to stick. This is because most practitioners don’t have the ability to produce powerful algebraic systems (which is what “good” abstractions are—“alegebras” over a business domain) because practitioners are generally not mathematicians, even have a philistine dislike/disdain for powerful systems if they have a whiff of mathematical-like power to them at all.<p>In this sense one could argue for an abstraction being “good” with respect to the social context in which they are operated in (i.e., if your team members don’t understand how to correctly wield an abstraction, is that abstraction good?) However I don’t like these kinds of arguments bc a lesser system is still capped in its power even if all its users understand it.<p>There are limits in what you can do with, say, Euclidean Geometry, even if it is much simpler to understand than other Gemotries. An often retort to this is No it isn’t. But that usually comes form perspectives with limited imagination. That said, many businesses are fine and thrive with limited imaginations.