There does seem to be a great deal of confusion about what abstraction actually means. I've seen 4000-line Python modules full of indirection up and down the i

There does seem to be a great deal of confusion about what abstraction actually means. I've seen 4000-line Python modules full of indirection up and down the inheritance chain described as "nicely abstracted" rather than "unmodifiable spaghetti." The reasoning was fuzzy: "you instantiate it and it just does everything you need." But you can't build anything new with it, and it makes so many assumptions about its environment that you can't change anything around it. However you define "abstraction", I'd call that a "boat anchor" instead.