

First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous - jimhoff11
http://joshimhoff.github.com/2012/05/24/abstraction.html

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eragnew
I'm starting to believe that people who disagree with your sentiments
described here simply don't get it yet (I, for one, agree with just about
everything you said). I don't mean that as a put-down and I don't mean that
condescendingly. We're all learning at our own pace. But I think you are
correct. Thanks for sharing this.

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vasco
"Electrical engineers work with Kirchhoff’s Voltage and Current Laws, not the
nightmare that is Maxwell’s Equations."

I have a strong feeling you are not an electrical engineer.

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jimhoff11
You are right. I did not mean to suggest that electrical engineering is easy
-- clearly, I know nothing about it -- but only that electrical engineering
benefits from abstractions too.

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vasco
Not using Maxwell's equations is surely not one of them :)

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j_baker
_The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as
one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer._

-Edsger Dijkstra

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SatvikBeri
IMO use of abstractions is vital to any profession, not just programming. This
is because of how the human brain is structured: we can only hold 5-9 things
in our working memory at any time. In order to tackle more complex concepts,
we have to chunk several basic ideas into one theory, which is a big part
(though not the only part) of what abstraction is all about.

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jasonkostempski
Great article right up until the last sentence. If anything moves a scientist
to prayer, he has been mislabeled.

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sp332
My grandfather, David Fisher, has been writing an international radio program
for decades called "Truth in the test tube". It's aimed at a general audience
so it's not very in-depth scientifically, but the idea is to interview
scientists who believe in God, just to get people to realize that they are not
mutually exclusive. <https://www.twr.org/judyblog/?p=2789> Even if you don't
agree with those beliefs, you can't claim that religious people can't be
scientists.

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pacaro
Regardless of your persuasion "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About"
by Knuth is well worth a read.

[http://www.amazon.com/Things-Computer-Scientist-Language-
Inf...](http://www.amazon.com/Things-Computer-Scientist-Language-
Information/dp/B00855V2PY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337969459&sr=8-2)

