Sure, the author points out a few examples of leaky abstractions. But his conclusion seems to be that you always will have to know what is behind the abstraction.
I don't think that's true. It depends on how the abstraction is defined, what it claims to be.
You can use TCP without knowing how the internals work, and assume that all data will be reliably delivered, _unless_ the connection is broken. That is a better abstraction.
And the virtual memory abstraction doesn't say that all memory accesses is guaranteed to take the same amount of time, so I don't consider it to be leaky.
So I don't entirely agree with the author's conclusions.
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Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again.
He seems to have confused cost and value. Free software has no cost, but still has value.
Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to always use a standard international system of units, to avoid these kind of problems...
This is worse than playing Battlefield 1942. Imagine trying to play them at the same time!!
Haystack isn't a game, stupid!
Sure, the author points out a few examples of leaky abstractions. But his conclusion seems to be that you always will have to know what is behind the abstraction.
I don't think that's true. It depends on how the abstraction is defined, what it claims to be.
You can use TCP without knowing how the internals work, and assume that all data will be reliably delivered, _unless_ the connection is broken. That is a better abstraction.
And the virtual memory abstraction doesn't say that all memory accesses is guaranteed to take the same amount of time, so I don't consider it to be leaky.
So I don't entirely agree with the author's conclusions.