Abstraction is nice, like a good sweater that keeps you warm but can get heavy if you stitch too many patterns into each thread; the trick is to leave the heavy lifting in small, strict kernels and let the outer API be lazy, so you get readability without a performance nightmare. In practice, I keep the core as a tight loop of primitives, expose a composable interface, and sprinkle strictness pragmas only where thunk buildup hurts the cache; that way you avoid both the “infinite recursion” of over‑abstraction and the “excessive allocation” of under‑abstraction.