Leaky abstractions
12th November 2002
Joel Spolsky: The Law of Leaky Abstractions
Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.
And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.
More recent articles
- AI assisted search-based research actually works now - 21st April 2025
- Maybe Meta's Llama claims to be open source because of the EU AI act - 19th April 2025
- Image segmentation using Gemini 2.5 - 18th April 2025