In reply to Brad Czerniak.

Interesting Brad. Are there any articles you can point me to? It will probably be a topic I should cover when talking about css preprocessors in a few weeks.

I hear you about not understanding the underlying language. I do think that's one potential con of abstraction. It's not an automatic bad thing, but there is potential for badness.

For example my computer only speaks in 1s and 0s, but that's not how I communicate with it. For the most part we communicate well and more more efficiently than if I did have to speak 1s and 0s only. On the other hand every so often a program crashes and perhaps crashes often and all the computer can tell me about why is a series of 1s and 0s that I don't understand. when that happens the abstraction hasn't really helped me, however it helps in so many other ways that the net is still much more a pro than a con.