Comment by johnmwilkinson

Expanding on this regarding the difference between abstraction vs encapsulation: abstraction is about the distillation of useful concepts while encapsulation is a specific tactic used to accomplish a behavior.

To continue with the idea of numbers, let’s say you asked someone to add 3 and 5. Is that encapsulation? What information are you hiding? You are not asking them to add coins or meters or reindeer. 3 and 5 are values independent of any underlying information. The numbers aren’t encapsulating anything.

Encapsulation is different. When you operate a motor vehicle, you concern yourself with the controls presented. This allows you, as the operator, to only need a tiny amount of knowledge to interact with an incredibly complex machine. This details have been encapsulated. There may be particular abstraction present, such as the notion of steering, acceleration, and breaking, but the way you interact with these will differ from vehicle to vehicle. Additionally, encapsulation is not concerned with the idea of steering, it is concerned with how to present steering in this specific case.

The two ideas are connected because using an abstraction in software often involves encapsulation. But they should not be conflated, out the likely result is bad abstractions and unwieldy encapsulation.