2019-06-15 - Abstraction is Magic

There's a saying in scientific circles about standing on the shoulders of giants. The idea being that what people are working on today is based on the knowledge gained by those that came before them. If everyone was starting from scratch then we'd never make any progress. Programming is the same way but our currency of progress is abstraction.

Abstraction is the idea of hiding details so that it's easier to focus on the bigger picture. When programming first started everything was done in machine code with the programmer telling the processor the exact actions to perform. This allowed absolute control and the possibility of extremely efficient programs but it also required the programmer to be very aware of the intricacies of the processor and it took a lot of work to develop a complete application. The invention of compilers allowed the details of the processor to be abstracted so that the programmer could focus more on the specifics of the application they wanted to create. The developers of the compiler still needed to know about the processor but their work allowed others to focus on bigger issues. Successive generations of programming languages and advances in operating systems and framework allow even more abstraction.

But abstraction is a double edged sword. It helps you to focus on the bigger picture and ignore the small details until there's a problem with those small details. It's really nice that the operating system has a mechanism for creating a dialog box until there's an issue creating that dialog box and the OS won't tell you want it is or how to fix it. When you are writing machine code there's never a situation where the processor does something you didn't explicitly tell it to do. The more abstractions you have the more things that are going on behind the scenes that you are not aware of. You also have less control over how exactly things work. When you are doing everything yourself it's easy to optimize operations to be very efficient for your specific case. Abstractions need to be general enough to meet a variety of needs so they may end up doing things that aren't required for your specific scenario.

I think the important thing here is that abstractions are required for programming to advance but we can't lose sight of what those abstractions are doing. You need to understand your abstractions to some degree if you are going to be successful at using them. This is the main thing that drives me to learn about assembly language, intermediate code, and compilers. I will likely never do anything with those concepts professionally but knowing them helps me work with them as abstractions.