[ranit]

> As engineers, scientists, researchers, etc our literal job is to break down problems into many smaller problems and then solve them one at a time.

Our literal job is also to look for and find patterns in these problems, so we can solve them as a more common problem, if possible, instead of solving them one at a time all the time.

[godelski]

Very true. But I didn't want to discuss elegance and abstraction as people seem to misunderstand abstraction in programming. I mean all programming is abstraction... abstraction isn't to be avoided, but things can become too abstract