The Sharp Edges of Leaky Abstractions

This talk explores some of the complexities and issues we introduce when we use and implement abstractions in computer programming.

Transcript

1. THE SHARP EDGES OF LEAKY ABSTRACTIONS MARK ALLEN – ALERT LOGIC MRALLEN1@YAHOO.COM @BYTEMEORG
2. “Every man shares a secret pain. Share it with me and gain strength from the sharing” -Sybok, Star Trek V
4. ABSTRACTION •Introduce levers •Encapsulate behaviors or domains •Remove complexity from problems
5. ABSTRACTIONS AS A SERVICE •TensorFlow •Amazon •Azure
6. ON PREMISE ABSTRACTIONS •Search (e.g., Elastic or Solr) •“Big Data” (e.g., Spark or Hadoop or $APACHE_PROJECT)
8. THE PITCH You don't need to know or understand these messy details about the abstraction you're using. The system accounts for all the things, so relax; write your system as you would expect to.
9. “It’ll be fine.”
12. LOOK AT ALL THIS FREE STUFF! • three different programming languages (!!), • automatic work division, • job retry on failure, • automatic collation of output from worker nodes, • job scheduling (with your own pluggable scheduler, even!) and • a reasonably nice web UI to track jobs and progress. It will even draw a DAG of the work elements!
14. The computer is not your friend
15. “I COME TO BURY CAESAR, NOT TO PRAISE HIM.” - ANTONY, JULIUS CAESAR, ACT 3, SCENE II
16. Obligatory cat picture
17. Spolsky’s Law of Software Abstractions: All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
20. What are we to do?
21. What causes leaky abstractions?
22. Abstracting the “wrong” thing
23. Abstracting something that can’t be abstracted
24. Leaky by design
25. Let us be honest with one another
26. Tutorials and documentation help
27. Give thought to how people might use your abstraction
28. Give thought to how people might operate your abstraction
29. Thank you
30. REFERENCES • https://hackernoon.com/leaky-by-design-7b423142ece0 • https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/ • https://hackernoon.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-4ca7ffb5a1a • http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html