The monoculture of meritocracy

I have nothing against using abstractions, as long as they are good ones. It's just that not all abstractions are good ones. This kind of discussion is really impossible to conduct properly without either drilling down on the features of good vs. bad abstractions, or talking about specific examples and why or why not they might succeed in what they do.

"A bare file descriptor is not."

Indeed. I quite think that libraries are better than file descriptors as abstractions for functionality. For instance, on java side you usually have a stream, and can easily replace it by your own class. C libraries, in contrast, often want file names or file descriptors, which is frankly inconvenient and irritating.

Heretical, I know.