Abstraction is critical to programming. It is the core activity we use to make more interesting and complex programs. Most of us understand abstraction as finding commonalities between different concepts, and modeling these as an inheritance hierarchy. If you are a retail store, then toy cars, trash cans, and pillows are all sellable items. Thus, …
Studying biology or economics, one finds organisms, ecosystems, and economies that are more than the sum of their parts. Somehow many interacting agents with limited information produce increasing organization, creating amazing complexity out of relatively simple components. In computing, if we want to harvest this potential for surprise, see results this interesting, we have to …
Programming is about translating what a human wants into instructions a computer can understand. Or is it? Thinking down this path, there are two ends of a programming language spectrum. A language can be close to the computer’s perspective: imperative languages that declare data, move and store data, carry out instructions in a fixed order. At …
It is often said that the developer should understand one level deeper than she’s working. If she’s writing Java, she should know how the JVM works. If he’s using a container, he should know conceptually what’s going on inside the container. This statement is true for more than just runtimes and frameworks, but all the …
We love to make abstractions. Human beings understand things in terms of abstractions, especially in terms of metaphors and similes. When we encounter something new, we find ways that it is like something similar. Eric Evans makes some great points about this in Software Is (Not) Like That, an article on DDD from way back …