3 ms·

I agree, besides, there's really no getting away from abstractions to manage complexity.

• tephra 3y ago
  Arguably managing complexity is one of the main things you do when doing programming
• lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  A stronger claim: everything in programming is an abstraction. Somewhat tangential, but I sense tacitly related... I sometimes sense that many people who program adhere to a kind of computational atomism, that there is some kind of underlying "real" and that everything else is "just" some kind of arrangement of elements of the real. But that's just an implementation detail. Yes, when we implement a language that compiles to instructions or bits on a specific machine, we are indeed working to simulate that language. But computation and formal languages don't really have anything to do with physical computers. Their connection is entirely incidental. It is a matter of practicality, like the choice of using a hammer versus a rock to drive spikes of metal through wood. A computer language is the "base" language. From the formal perspective, there is no "low-level" or "high-level" language, just different languages that compilers can translate between. What is "low-level" (typically the target language) is merely low-level by convention, usually because we are targeting a given machine instruction set of some physical machine. But even here, the notion of an "instruction" or a "bit" are abstractions. There are no "bits" in the world as ontological entities. Computation and data are abstract, full stop. All physical implementations are simply instruments for simulating that abstract model. There is no difference, in principle, between using checker pieces, differences in voltage, magnetic polarity, or thumbs up/thumbs down to represent bits. The language should, ideally, be suited to the domain of discourse.