I like the idea of TCP as a leaky abstraction because it points out the difficulty of engineering the abstraction we really want. It would be wonderful for TCP to be a guaranteed connection abstraction, but it turns out in today's world, the abstraction of a reliable connection is TCP + a network administrator + a guy with wire snips + solder (metaphorically). Maybe down the road, AIs and repair bots will be involved, and the guaranteed connection abstraction might become real or much much stronger. Although it gets more complicated because if a message takes hours to deliver, is that going to work for your application? Yes if you're archiving documents, no if you're trying to set up a video conference call or display a web page.

TCP is problematic in modern circumstances (think: Inside a data center) because a response within milliseconds is what's expected to make the process viable. TCP was designed to accommodate some element of the path being a 300 Baud modem, where a response time in seconds is possible as the modem dials the next hop, so the TCP timeouts are unuseable. QUIC was developed to address this kind of problem. My point being, the abstraction of a guaranteed _timely_ connection is even harder.

I think Joel could have expanded his thoughts to include the degree of leak. SQL is a leaky abstraction itself, yes, but my own take is that ORMs are much leakier: Every ORM introduction document I've read explains the notation by saying "here's the sql that is produced". I think of ORMs as not a bucket with holes, but a bucket with half the bottom removed.