Programming Abstractions

A case for abstractions

Abstractions are quite useful to manage complexity by hiding implementation details and presenting simple interfaces. If they are well-designed, they can enable higher order concepts, enabling collaboration at scale, since everyone won't be required to understand every tiny details behind the abstraction. It can reduce cognitive tax, make it easy maintaining software. It can respond to changes by encapsulating functionality behind the stable interfaces

A case against abstractions

Poorly designed abstractions can introduce more complexity, create obscurity with unnecessary layers Every layer of abstraction added carries performance cost in function calls, memory overhead. Leaky abstractions - Those that fail to fully hide their implementations, may add to cognitive overload since developers have top understand both the interface and the implementation. Over-abstractions can lead to bloat, trying to handle too much, over-generalization, can lead to increased load of maintenance

Finding the sweet spot is real engineering !