Lambda the Ultimate

Today I learned a new term from a blog post:

An interesting phenomena I've observed over my years as a programmer is the occurrence of "Peak Abstraction" within a young programmer - and their subsequent improvement.

There is a common pattern. It typically occurs after 3-4 years of professional practice. A programmer is growing in his confidence. He begins to tackle more complex, challenging problems. And, he reflects those problems with complex, challenging data structures. He has not yet learnt the fine art of simplicity.

Every member of every data structure is a pointer or a reference. There are no simple data types. ... Those around them become increasingly desperate. They can see the code becoming inflated, inefficient, unmaintainable.

And then it happens. The programmer realises the error of their ways. They realise that they are adding neither design value nor computational value. They realise they are adding overhead and maintenance trouble. ... And thus the recovery begins. Data structures become simple, expressive, and maintainable.

The complete blog post rags mostly on perf issues, but I'm more interested in the complexity implications. I felt myself go through this before, and to be honest the more powerful the language, the worse my peak abstraction got. It was only when moving to a less expressive language (C# rather than Scala) that I had incentive to keep it simple.

Has anyone else found themselves in an abstraction trap and come down as they grew as a programmer? What can we do in PL design to avoid, or at least discourage, overuse of abstraction? Is this a case of where less might be more?

Kalani Thielen's The Algebra of Data, and the Calculus of Mutation is a very good explanation of ADTs, and also scratches the surfaces of Zippers:

With the spreading popularity of languages like F# and Haskell, many people are encountering the concept of an algebraic data type for the first time. When that term is produced without explanation, it almost invariably becomes a source of confusion. In what sense are data types algebraic? Is there a one-to-one correspondence between the structures of high-school algebra and the data types of Haskell? Could I create a polynomial data type? Do I have to remember the quadratic formula? Are the term-transformations of (say) differential calculus meaningful in the context of algebraic data types? Isn’t this all just a bunch of general abstract nonsense?

(hat tip to Daniel Yokomizo, who used to be an LtU member...)