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> It's funny you mention that, because Design of Everyday Things has a whole part about how people abstracting away the implementation leads to people having ex

by p-e-w 3y ago

> It's funny you mention that, because Design of Everyday Things has a whole part about how people abstracting away the implementation leads to people having extremely wrong ideas about how things work. Which, funnily enough, isn't a problem at all, unless the abstraction is leaky, or the purpose of the thing itself is poorly explained. The abstraction is "the way things work". If not, something is fundamentally wrong with the design.

strogonoff 3y ago
Every abstraction is leaky.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Not true in practice. Billions of websites work just fine when viewed on wildly different platform stacks, without developers or users ever having to care about differences in CPU architecture or kernel design.
  - strogonoff 3y ago
    That’s interface compatibility, not abstraction. For your example, you can just as well say that billions of cars work well on wildly different types of roads. Abstraction as in the throttle example is more like ORM vs. SQL (we all know someone who ran into issues with the former in a non-trivial project). You simplify the idea of X to Y, which works in Z% but breaks down otherwise.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Sure, but the amount of leakiness varies a lot. And in practice, most of the time we just don't need to care. Of course the canonical, annoying examples of the leaky abstractions involve software stacks, where we end up writing a bunch of code, and find that things work great until weird edge cases happen, and then we get upset and have to dig through the abstractions to figure out what's going on. But the leaks in a lot of real-world abstractions just don't matter. Like the accelerator pedal in a car. That one does leak a bit in some places: for example, pressing the pedal isn't linear. On a (usually ICE) car with a geared transmission, pressing the pedal hard when in gear one gives you different results than when you press it hard when in gear six. But then you switch to an EV and the response is different. Or even switch to a different ICE car with a different transmission, and the response is different. But ultimately that doesn't really matter; the person driving gets used to it in very short order. The leaks in that abstraction just don't matter all that much.
  - strogonoff 3y ago
    > That one does leak a bit in some places: for example, pressing the pedal isn't linear. That’s the least of your problems, because it leaks profusely. We could start with the fact that in many scenarios the “accelerator” pedal does not, in fact, accelerate. This is not an edge case—any driver who had to drive on ice, snow, dirt or otherwise not have traction knows that. What it does do reliably is make the wheels (some or all, depending on your car) go faster. > But ultimately that doesn't really matter; the person driving gets used to it in very short order. Let’s recap. I believe you were saying that the abstraction is leaky, the system does not always do what we expect, and even though many of us don’t really care to understand how the system works it’s OK because we sort of adjust and roll with it because for all its faults the system is good enough (and, perhaps much more importantly, we’re used to it). Hold on, it’s almost as if you’re talking about one well-known version control system… …and on balance I’d agree with you, except I think a serious software engineer is more like an auto mechanic or professional racer rather than a casual driver—“press the pedal to go faster” doesn’t really cut it, and we should have a good and correct model of how Git works.

by p-e-w 3y ago

strogonoff 3y ago

Every abstraction is leaky.

p-e-w 3y ago
Not true in practice. Billions of websites work just fine when viewed on wildly different platform stacks, without developers or users ever having to care about differences in CPU architecture or kernel design.
- strogonoff 3y ago
  That’s interface compatibility, not abstraction. For your example, you can just as well say that billions of cars work well on wildly different types of roads. Abstraction as in the throttle example is more like ORM vs. SQL (we all know someone who ran into issues with the former in a non-trivial project). You simplify the idea of X to Y, which works in Z% but breaks down otherwise.
kelnos 3y ago
Sure, but the amount of leakiness varies a lot. And in practice, most of the time we just don't need to care. Of course the canonical, annoying examples of the leaky abstractions involve software stacks, where we end up writing a bunch of code, and find that things work great until weird edge cases happen, and then we get upset and have to dig through the abstractions to figure out what's going on. But the leaks in a lot of real-world abstractions just don't matter. Like the accelerator pedal in a car. That one does leak a bit in some places: for example, pressing the pedal isn't linear. On a (usually ICE) car with a geared transmission, pressing the pedal hard when in gear one gives you different results than when you press it hard when in gear six. But then you switch to an EV and the response is different. Or even switch to a different ICE car with a different transmission, and the response is different. But ultimately that doesn't really matter; the person driving gets used to it in very short order. The leaks in that abstraction just don't matter all that much.
- strogonoff 3y ago
  > That one does leak a bit in some places: for example, pressing the pedal isn't linear. That’s the least of your problems, because it leaks profusely. We could start with the fact that in many scenarios the “accelerator” pedal does not, in fact, accelerate. This is not an edge case—any driver who had to drive on ice, snow, dirt or otherwise not have traction knows that. What it does do reliably is make the wheels (some or all, depending on your car) go faster. > But ultimately that doesn't really matter; the person driving gets used to it in very short order. Let’s recap. I believe you were saying that the abstraction is leaky, the system does not always do what we expect, and even though many of us don’t really care to understand how the system works it’s OK because we sort of adjust and roll with it because for all its faults the system is good enough (and, perhaps much more importantly, we’re used to it). Hold on, it’s almost as if you’re talking about one well-known version control system… …and on balance I’d agree with you, except I think a serious software engineer is more like an auto mechanic or professional racer rather than a casual driver—“press the pedal to go faster” doesn’t really cut it, and we should have a good and correct model of how Git works.