Comment by nomel

Comment by nomel 2 days ago

The only people I've known that share this perspective are those that hate abstraction. Going back to their code, to extend it in some way, almost always requires a rewrite, because they wrote it with the goal of minimum viable complexity rather than understanding the realities of the real world problem they're solving, like "we all know we need these other features, but we have a deadline!"

For one off, this is fine. For anything maintainable, that needs to survive the realities of time, this is truly terrible.

Related, my friend works in a performance critical space. He can't use abstractions, because the direct, bare metal, "exact fit" implementation will perform best. They can't really add features, because it'll throw the timing of others things off to much, so usually have to re-architect. But, that's the reality of their problem space.

johnmwilkinson 2 days ago

I believe this is conflating abstraction with encapsulation. The former is about semantic levels, the later about information hiding.

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nomel 2 days ago

Maybe I am? How is it possible to abstract without encapsulation? And also, how is it possible to encapsulate without abstracting some concept (intentionally or not) contained in that encapsulation? I can't really differentiate them, in the context of naming/referencing some list of CPU operations.

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- Retric 2 days ago
  
  > How is it possible to abstract without encapsulation.
  Historically pure machine code with jumps etc lacked any from of encapsulation as any data can be accessed and updated by anything.
  However, you would still use abstractions. If you pretend the train is actually going 80.2 MPH instead of somewhere between 80.1573 MPH to 80.2485 MPH which you got from different sensors you don’t need to do every calculation that follows twice.
  
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  nomel a day ago
  
  I'm using the industry definition of abstraction [1]:
  > In software, an abstraction provides access while hiding details that otherwise might make access more challenging
  I read this as "an encapsulation of a concept". In software, I think it can be simplified to "named lists of operations".
  > Historically pure machine code with jumps etc lacked any from of encapsulation as any data can be accessed and updated by anything.
  Not practically, by any stretch of the imagination. And, if the intent is to write silly code, modern languages don't really change much, it's just the number of operations in the named lists will be longer.
  You would use calls and returns (or just jumps if not supported), and then name and reference the resulting subroutine in your assembler or with a comment (so you could reference it as "call 0x23423 // multiply R1 and R2"), to encapsulate the concept. If those weren't supported, you would use named macros [2]. Your assembler would used named operations, sometimes expanding to multiple opcodes, with each opcode having a conceptually relevant name in the manual, which abstracted a logic circuit made with named logic gates, consisting of named switches, that shuffled around named charge carriers. Say your code just did a few operations, the named abstraction for the list of operations (which all these things are) there would be "blink_light.asm".
  > If you pretend the train is actually going 80.2 MPH instead of somewhere between 80.1573 MPH to 80.2485 MPH which you got from different sensors you don’t need to do every calculation that follows twice.
  I don't see this as an abstraction as much as a simple engineering compromise (of accuracy) dictated by constraint (CPU time/solenoid wear/whatever), because you're not hiding complexity as much as ignoring it.
  I see what you're saying, and you're probably right, but I see the concepts as equivalent. I see an abstraction as a functional encapsulation of a concept. An encapsulation, if not nonsense, will be some meaningful abstraction (or a renaming of one).
  I'm genuinely interested in an example of an encapsulation that isn't an abstraction, and an abstraction that isn't a conceptual encapsulation, to right my perspective! I can't think of any.
  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)
  [2] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/assembly_programming/assembly...
  
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jahsome a day ago

I don't see how the two are related, personally. I'm regularly accused of over-abstraction specifically because I aspire to make each abstraction do as little as possible, i.e. fewest lines possible.

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galaxyLogic a day ago

"Abstracting" means extracting the commnon parts of multiple instances, and making everything else a parameter. The difficulty for software is that developers often start by writing the abstraction, rather than having multiple existing instances and then writing code that collects the common parts of those multiple instances into a single abstraction. I guess that is what "refactoring" is about.
In sciences and humanities abstraction is applied the proper way, studying the instances first then describing multitude of existing phenomena by giving names to their common repeating descriptions.

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nomel a day ago

I call that lasagna code! From what I've seen, developers start with spaghetti, overcompensate with lasagna, then end up with some organization more optimized for the human, that minimizes cognitive load while reading.
To me, abstraction is an encapsulation of some concept. I can't understand how they're practically different, unless you encapsulate true nonsense, without purpose or resulting meaning, which I can't think of an example of, since humans tend to categorize/name everything. I'm dumb.

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