Abstraction - the generalization of a single instance into a repeatable, sometimes parametrizable pattern that can be reasoned about - is the bread and butter of the technical world. Think for a second about the levels of abstraction that needed to be climbed for you to read these words! Every computer in the world fundamentally only does one thing - binary math! That's it. But we use abstraction to turn that math into letters stored in a database, bits of an internet packet sent to a server and encoded on a magnetic medium somewhere, finally even small colored dots on a screen that look like the letters we want.
The abstraction trap
The abstraction trap
The abstraction trap
Abstraction - the generalization of a single instance into a repeatable, sometimes parametrizable pattern that can be reasoned about - is the bread and butter of the technical world. Think for a second about the levels of abstraction that needed to be climbed for you to read these words! Every computer in the world fundamentally only does one thing - binary math! That's it. But we use abstraction to turn that math into letters stored in a database, bits of an internet packet sent to a server and encoded on a magnetic medium somewhere, finally even small colored dots on a screen that look like the letters we want.