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On Abstraction, by Zach Tellman [1hr] https://t.co/ATNkuHBdmN
- couldn't find some other field that he could steal the answers from - books address pieces of it, but no comprehensive overview applicable to software - read a book that seemed relevant, found the bits that seemed interesting, looked at its references - 6 months, no progress
"abstraction is the mapping of a concrete implementation onto some sort of abstract external interface." list of integers, a sorted list, tree, hashset... each, from external POV... are identical – they map onto the same point this mapping = the abstraction function https://t.co/MTTcVOB2q6
environment is important ~1700s, british govt offered ~$3m for clock that kept accurate time on a ship the rocking of the ship, barometric pressure, gravity, etc all conspire to ruin regular clock readings John Harrison spent 40 years solving this https://t.co/hC6VHubdpM https://t.co/d206GRgUFr
all the data in the model comes from the environment, so the model *reflects* the environment https://t.co/0hgTpDpMX2
take an observation about the world map it into the model manipulate the model to try to predict what will happen in the world physics doesn't quite succeed at this – newton couldn't predict the orbit of mercury, einstein could, but not black holes... need richer models https://t.co/GEJknVdIz0
