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2 points by akkartik 4420 days ago | link | parent

Yeah, sorry the names have been so useless in penetrating my meaning. I'm planning to write a followup without ever using the words 'abstraction', 'library' or 'service'. Libraries don't have to suck, if you know about how they work. My definition of abstraction was that you had to know something about how it was implemented. It's just that in the real world we don't know how 99% of our libraries work, and our entire eco-system encourages that, and library writers don't care to make their implementations easy to understand because, "Who does that, go read about how it works? Just a couple of guys who'd figure it out anyway, even if I gave them no documentation."

To answer your question, the first example that pops to mind is file uploads in arc. Let's consider a parallel universe where arc came with multi-part file upload support, and it worked for you out of the box, and you never came here with questions, and I never delved into how it worked. In that scenario the file-upload features in arc would be a service to me, not an abstraction. But in this universe all those things happened[1], and now file-upload is an abstraction for me. I know I can get into its guts if I find something wrong. I've become a lion when it comes to file upload (http://paulgraham.com/boss.html).

Notice that this would be true even if the code I wrote for it were identical to the code the authors of arc would have written (ha!). This isn't a technical argument but a social one: Programmers should learn about their dependencies. Or put another way: Ask not if something is an abstraction. Ask if it is an abstraction to you.

(Did that make sense?)

[1] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=16224