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I'm not 100% certain I agree with this. Clearly, you can go too far with abstractions. I mean, I'm really annoyed by Java's "Let's just fix this with another layer of abstraction" strategy. But at the same time, it's fairly frequent that you need a couple of levels of abstractions to do something complex.

It's not abstractions per-se I'm arguing against. It's when you have a slightly flawed abstraction and instead of fixing the abstraction you introduce another abstraction to "hide" the flaws.

Or if your tests are slow from loading Rails each time you can use Spork:

https://github.com/sporkrb/spork https://github.com/sporkrb/spork-rails

Never could get it to work without making our tests flaky. Flaky tests are far, far worse than slow tests.

Spork+Guard does wonders. I've never had a problem when I've used them together.

I think "web applications" are themselves an abstraction.

Why not just run the application from your own machine?

Same interface, same commands, superior performance and security.

How about letting users add abstraction if they want, but not forcing it on them?

Abstraction Creep