A leaky abstraction is like obscenity: I know it when I see it. It's impossible to define the concept in a rigorous way, and yet it impacts everything that we do.

You're simply wrong to claim that we accept the situation without spending any real effort. In reality the more experienced developers who build abstraction layers tend to spend a lot of time trying to prevent leaks, but they can't have perfect foresight to predict what capabilities others will need. Software abstractions often last through multiple major generations of hardware technology with wildly different capabilities: you can't prevent those changes from leaking through to higher levels and it would be foolhardy to even try.

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random3 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I understand your position and I think it's the norm. Yet I find it difficult to comprehend how it's not self-evidently absurd.

Do you feel like software transcends pyhsics, mathematics and logics? Because that's what the statement translates to.

The only reason it's impossible, is because nobody tries, because trying to do so would interfer with the deliverables of next sprint. The software industry has painted itself into a corner.

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pjm331 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"Software people are not alone in facing complexity. Physics deals with terribly complex objects even at the "fundamental" particle level. The physicist labors on, however, in a firm faith that there are unifying principles to be found, whether in quarks or in unified field theories. Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary.

No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity he must master is arbitrary complexity, forced without rhyme or reason by the many human institutions and systems to which his interfaces must conform. These differ from interface to interface, and from time to time, not because of necessity but only because they were designed by different people, rather than by God."

- Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet

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AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Physics is full of leaky abstractions. Solid? Leaky abstraction (melting). Ideal gas? Leaky abstraction (van der Walls). Molecule? Leaky abstraction (chemical reactions). Atom? Leaky abstraction (ionization, fusion, fission, alpha and beta decay). Proton? Leaky abstraction (sometimes you have to care about the quarks).

	▲	random3 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Check out Urs Schreiber if you want to get over it