Plenty of physics papers end up being useful in ways the authors never conceived. I don't think the authors writing down their best guess of the importance of their results, prevents others from using the results or techniques in alternate ways. In fact, I frequently see this happening.

But the authors writing down their best guess of the importance of their results helps others judge the minimum importance of the results, and decide whether they want to read the paper in the first place.

The abstraction capabilities in modern c++ made it more fun and allowed me to condense programs in totally unexpected ways. More abstract code was simpler and sometimes easier to understand.

But after a while (usually my version 4 or 5) if I abstracted it too much (Templatized it, made work for Unicode or char types) etc. the complexity would shoot up again. It became incomprehensible even to me even though I had written it. I knew it worked because it gave the same result but it was no longer anchored/rooted in anything real.

There is a zone of usefulness that is between the completely abstract and the concrete. Physics lives in this zone…it uses mathematics but they don’t feel the need to generalize to N dimensions or to assume the constants of nature are variable—unless they have to.

This is why all good descriptions of mathematics start by showing a concrete problem they want to solve. Gauss invented the FFT algorithm to simplify his calculations of the orbit of Ceres. He had the numbers in front of him and tried to reduce his computational workload by exploiting a repeated pattern in the computations. Teaching the FFT as a fait acompli and showing asteroid orbit as a sample application is ass backwards.