Modern programming is all about abstracting away detail to allow the programmer to concentrate on the structure and other stuff that matters, but it seems to me

Modern programming is all about abstracting away detail to allow the programmer to concentrate on the structure and other stuff that matters, but it seems to me (and I may be wrong) that increasingly we find things that look the same, get used the same, generally behave the same, and then are different in a corner case. I agree. I would paraphrase this as: Leaky abstractions cause bugs, and unfortunately all abstractions turn out to leak at some point (I think someone else said it this way before, but I can't remember who right now). EDIT: Found it - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm... This doesn't mean we shouldn't use abstractions of course - it just means each abstraction comes with a cost.