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The Law of Leaky Abstractions

Posted by michael on from the house-of-cards dept.

Joel Spolsky has a nice essay on the leaky abstractions which underlie all high-level programming. Good reading, even for non-programmers.

1 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. Abstraction is GOOD by melonman · · Score: 0, Troll

    So just to get this straight, next time I want to sort some data from a text file and output it, instead of using Perl, I should carve the algorithm into a block of silicon with a chisel instead? Good abstraction is good, because it lets people ship reliable products quickly. Bad abstraction is bad, but not as bad as bad C programming with pointers. And the 'knowing how it works' argument for low-level is generally spurious, because of emergent complexity: even if you know what every line of code in the Linux kernel does, predicting how a network of 100 LInux boxes will perform when running a particular mix of applications, for example, is impossible in practice.

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