“Let’s say I am giving directions for how to leave this room,” he says, gesturing to the white-walled, white-boarded Google office around him […]
“In Python, I would just say something like, ‘Get up and go through the door.’ In other languages, I might have to say something like, ‘Stand up, but not with so much force that you fall over, take three steps to the north, take one step to the east, approach the door, check that it is open, if it is not open, open it, then step through it with this amount of speed …’ ”
“The programmer is abstracted from controlling the minutiae in the computer,” he notes. Sometimes, that might be a bad thing. Lower-level languages allow the programmer to manipulate the computer with more-precise instructions, for instance.
But in developing for the Web, such succinctness, when well designed, is often invaluable to a hacker since it lets her code so much faster.
Great analogy for abstraction. And great piece worth reading in its entirety.
