Comment by dcolkitt

The point of isolating abstractions is that you don't have to jump and back and forth. You look at a function, and you understand from its contract and calling convention you immediately know what it does. The specific details aren't relevant for the layer of abstraction you're looking at.

Because of well structured abstractions, thoughtful naming conventions, documentation where required, and extensive testing you trust that the function does what it says. If I'm looking at a function like commitPending(), I simply see writeToDisk() and move on. I'm in the object representation layer, and jumping down into the details of the I/O layers breaks flow by moving to a different level of abstraction. The point is I trust writeToDisk() behaves reasonably and safely, and I don't need to inspect its contents, and definitely don't want to inline its code.

If you find that you frequently need to jump down the tree from sub-routine to sub-routine to understand the high level code, then that's a definite code smell. Most likely something is fundamentally broken in your abstraction model.