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If you like this, my other favorite essay by Joel is Making Wrong Code Look Wrong: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...
HTML fragments should never be stored in strings.
> Back to TCP. Earlier for the sake of simplicity I told a little fib, and some of you have steam coming out of your ears by now because this fib is driving you crazy. I said that TCP guarantees that your message will arrive. It doesn’t, actually. If your pet snake has chewed through the network cable leading to your computer, and no IP packets can get through, then TCP can’t do anything about it and your message doe…
I wouldn't call TCP leaky because it can't deliver data across a broken network cable, for example. It's abstracting away certain unreliable features of the network, like out of order delivery of packets. It's not abstracting away the fact that networking requires a network.
I never liked the way he used TCP as an example here. I don't think it's sensible to think of "make it reliable" as a process of abstraction or simplification (it's obviously not possible to build a reliable connection on top of IP if by "reliable" you mean "will never fail"). "You might have to cope with a TCP connection failing" doesn't seem to be the same sort of thing as his other examples of leaky abstractions.…
Very nicely worded. But I would also add that:
1. An abstraction can often be manned by one person, so when it leaks only one person needs to understand it deeply enough to fix it.
2. The article seems to miss the iterative nature of abstractions. Over time, the goal is to iterate on the abstraction so that it exposes more of the stuff that matters, and less of the stuff that doesn’t matter. Perhaps all abstractions leak, but some leak way less often and save much more thinking in the meantime than others. Rather than lamenting the nature of abstractions we should focus effort on making them as practically useful as possible.
> Back to TCP. Earlier for the sake of simplicity I told a little fib, and some of you have steam coming out of your ears by now because this fib is driving you crazy. I said that TCP guarantees that your message will arrive. It doesn’t, actually. If your pet snake has chewed through the network cable leading to your computer, and no IP packets can get through, then TCP can’t do anything about it and your message doe…
Cannot everyone get the sense that how we currently build software is one gigantic leaky abstraction?
> Back to TCP. Earlier for the sake of simplicity I told a little fib, and some of you have steam coming out of your ears by now because this fib is driving you crazy. I said that TCP guarantees that your message will arrive. It doesn’t, actually. If your pet snake has chewed through the network cable leading to your computer, and no IP packets can get through, then TCP can’t do anything about it and your message doe…
I unflagged you by vouching for you. I found your post difficult to understand and couldn't figure out what you are trying to say, but I agree it was not deserving of a flag.
> Back to TCP. Earlier for the sake of simplicity I told a little fib, and some of you have steam coming out of your ears by now because this fib is driving you crazy. I said that TCP guarantees that your message will arrive. It doesn’t, actually. If your pet snake has chewed through the network cable leading to your computer, and no IP packets can get through, then TCP can’t do anything about it and your message doe…