- An abstraction that reveals details that it is supposed to abstract away. As stated in 2002 by Joel Spolsky in the “Law of Leaky Abstractions”: “All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.” The statement highlights a particularly problematic cause of software defects, namely the reliance of the software developer on an abstraction’s infallibility. While abstractions try to hide complexity, the law claims that developers of reliable software must learn the abstraction’s underlying details anyway. ← Wikipedia
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