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What a great quote, thanks for sharing!

• mikmoila 9y ago
  Another: "Abstraction is selective ignorance. - Andrew Koenig."
  • danidiaz 9y ago
    Two more: "The abstract is no more than an instrument, an organ, to see the concrete clearly." —José Ortega y Gasset "Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality."—Saunders Mac Lane, who knew a thing or two about abstraction
    • notduncansmith 9y ago
      I’ll drop one of my favorites, from Ken Iverson’s “Notation As A Tool Of Thought”: “The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.” http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm The full paper is wonderful and will make you a better developer.
      • platz 9y ago
        This one seems odd. Jargon is a barrier, but also an efficiency to the extent is solves a problem.
        • dwaltrip 9y ago
          Jargon should be as minimally complex and extensive as needed to express the relevant concepts, given the context. The complexity and amount of jargon is proportional to the difficulty of using that jargon, so overly complicated jargon imposes an unnecessary cost on everyone who encounters it or interacts with it. It sounds like you are saying that jargon is good if it can more effectively express some idea than was possible before. I totally agree with this, it's a great point. But sometimes the additional expressiveness does not compensate enough for the unfamiliarity or peculiarity, making it not worth it, and so it probably won't be adopted by others.