3 ms·

I know what you mean, but you need to find a different or more nuanced term. Deduplication is abstraction, it just isn't an abstraction mapped to the domain pro

• dgreensp 8y ago
  Conceptual or semantic compression, yes, as the rest of that section makes clear. The very problem with deduplication without abstraction is not thinking at the conceptual level, only at the literal code level. There are lots of ways to compress code, e.g. minifying it :) Quoting the start of the article: Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process where general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal ("real" or "concrete") signifiers, first principles, or other methods. For the Button case, you'd have to come up with some concept of what a Button is and does, beyond what code lives in its file (e.g. an onClick handler that calls handleClick, etc.) in order to have an abstraction. There are "wrong" abstractions (in the sense of abstractions that turn out to need to be changed later, like any code), but if you lump all deduplication into abstraction then you will have a skewed sense of the cost of changing an abstraction. The cost of changing an abstraction also depends on your programming language; if you spend a lot of time in a dynamically-typed language, you may internalize that refactoring is tedious and error-prone and often intractable.