Leaky Abstractions (19 Nov 2002)
- The Missing Chapter from The Art of Deception
- Total tracking of sex offenders in the UK
- CIL - Parsing C
- Good HTML and CSS references
The UCL and Imperial merger is off, thank god!
Everyone seems to be commenting on leaky abstractions, in which Joel berates non-perfect abstractions. Well, enough people have taken him to task for that but no one seems to point out that perfect abstractions can be a total nightmare in certain situations.
Now, I'm sure we all know the advantages of abstractions, but in some cases you aren't writing portable applications and the abstractions only serve to frustrate you.
Take TCP. There is no way to find out which data has been acked by the other side, the seq/ack numbers etc from any sockets implementation that I've ever seen. When you're writing freaky NAT stuff that information can be needed. See the exokernels papers for designs which take the idea of pierceable abstractions to the (safe) limit.
I consider myself quite the expert on prawn cocktail sandwiches. I've had them from all round the country, from several other countries, and even fresh in a fishing village. But living just down the road from Harrods I thought I might as well give them a shot. Quite frankly, I don't think I'll ever be able to stomached a non-Harrods prawn cocktail sandwich ever again!