Abstraction Impedance

[Andrew Wills]

Hey folks,

I stumbled across this interesting blog from 2005 that discussed an
idiom I hadn't encountered before: Abstraction Impedance.

http://hinchcliffe.org/archive/2005/09/22/2233.aspx

In a nutshell, the notion seems to be that "[n]ow that the
object-oriented paradigm has become established as the predominate
model of abstraction in software development, developers have been
incurring a large amount of overhead in mapping it to other
abstractions, specifically XML and relational databases." He suggests
that developers may be spending (loosing) as much as 40% of their time
in this way.

I wish I had time to explore all the info he cites and consider it
more carefully. I'm inclined to see the problem he describes as a
subset of the issues inherent in the Jigsaw Puzzle Paradigm of
software development, and to think the 40% figure is correspondingly
too small.

Why do we map data from one abstraction to another anyway? It can't
just be for our health... it must be related to what we intend to *do*
with that data, and how the components we interact with expect that
data to arrive. These expectations are all over the map.

drew

[Jason Shao (CampusEAI Consortium)]

I think this concept also touches on the recent popularity in scripting languages - loose/duck typed languages, and less pure tend to lead less towards the kind of rigid Object-centricism of Java (I seem to recall an article about how Java has nouns, but forget verbs - as a nod-towards the functional-paradigm)

I have to admit, having just walked through a project where we used Rhino so we could run Javascript & leverage E4X was much more pleasant than working in most of the common Java XML toolkit/bindings.

Jason
________________________________________
From: cernunnos-...@googlegroups.com [cernunnos-...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Wills [wills...@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 8:37 PM
To: cernunnos-discussion
Subject: [Cernunnos] Abstraction Impedance

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