  In recent years, various vendors have made quantum software frameworks
available. Yet with vendor-specific frameworks, code portability seems at risk,
especially in a field where hardware and software libraries have not yet
reached a consolidated state, and even foundational aspects of the technologies
are still in flux. Accordingly, the development of vendor-independent quantum
programming languages and frameworks is often suggested. This follows the
established architectural pattern of introducing additional levels of
abstraction into software stacks, thereby piling on layers of abstraction. Yet
software architecture also provides seemingly less abstract alternatives,
namely to focus on hardware-specific formulations of problems that peel off
unnecessary layers. In this article, we quantitatively and experimentally
explore these strategic alternatives, and compare popular quantum frameworks
from the software implementation perspective. We find that for several
specific, yet generalisable problems, the mathematical formulation of the
problem to be solved is not just sufficiently abstract and serves as precise
description, but is likewise concrete enough to allow for deriving
framework-specific implementations with little effort. Additionally, we argue,
based on analysing dozens of existing quantum codes, that porting between
frameworks is actually low-effort, since the quantum- and framework-specific
portions are very manageable in terms of size, commonly in the order of mere
hundreds of lines of code. Given the current state-of-the-art in quantum
programming practice, this leads us to argue in favour of peeling off
unnecessary abstraction levels.
