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On Nov 11, 2006, at 3:18 AM, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/indirection_is_not_abstraction.html Yes! That "abstraction isn't implementation" rant is a great condensation of my frustration with GUI APIs and network APIs over the years. I've been talking about this same distinction, but I hadn't been able to condense the distinction down far enough... I'd referred to indirect interfaces as the "mainframe era approach" to the problem, and the abstract interface as the "UNIX era" one, because for me the switch from the mainframe style way of doing simple things like opening files by creating file control blocks, finding the catalog table and the access method and so on to the UNIX way of calling "open" with the name of the file was an epiphany. The UNIX developers found or assembled a collection of abstractions that swept away thousands of indirect interfaces and replaced them with twenty or so system calls. Wonderful! Finding a good abstraction is hard. Trying to find one is a recipe for disaster, because if you mess up you can lock yourself into a box. But it's so necessary.There's stuff above here
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