[prog] Joel on Software: Leaky Abstractions

[Mary]

Tangentially related to the current thread:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

Joel's argument is that you cannot completely abstract away underlying
levels of software. In the same way that you have to drive slower in the
rain even though you have windscreen wipers and heaters to abstract it
away, a C++ programmer using a string class will eventually try to
concatenate two string literals ("foo" + "bar") and run into problems
because a string literal is a char* and not a string...

-Mary