Simon Willison’s Weblog

Find a level of abstraction that works for what you need to do. When you have trouble there, look beneath that abstraction. You won’t be seeing how things really work, you’ll be seeing a lower-level abstraction that could be helpful. Sometimes what you need will be an abstraction one level up. Is your Python loop too slow? Perhaps you need a C loop. Or perhaps you need numpy array operations.

You (probably) don’t need to learn C.

— Ned Batchelder

# 24th January 2024, 6:25 pm / programming, python, ned-batchelder, abstractions, c

Good design in computer programming consists of inventing abstractions that don’t leak.  Good programming consists of implementing those abstractions in such a way that they don’t leak.

— Mike Taylor

# 26th April 2010, 5:42 pm / mike-taylor, abstractions, programming