ComplexityLaw

Law of Leaky Abstractions

An abstraction can hide complexity, but it cannot make the underlying system disappear.

A plain-language paraphrase. Original sources below.

The idea behind it

Joel Spolsky describes how substantial abstractions inevitably expose some details of the systems beneath them. A database query still has a cost; a network call can still fail. Abstractions help us work, but debugging their failures often requires understanding the layer they hide.

Go to the source

The Law of Leaky Abstractions — Joel Spolsky

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