Computers are to manipulate data.
Data = representations = abstractions
This article is so fundamentally lost that it forgets what computers are for.
Computers exist to implement abstractions.
Data = representations = abstractions
This article is so fundamentally lost that it forgets what computers are for.
Computers exist to implement abstractions.
"10" is the representation of a data; "0xA" is another representation of the same data.
Not being able to touch something doesn't make it an abstraction. Light is not an abstraction, a contract is not an abstraction. 10 is not an abstraction, it is an ordinal [1].
"Isomorphism" is an abstraction. It doesn't name a particular data or value, but a class of functions that share common properties. A function template or functions written in a dynamically typed language can describe a particular group of isomorphism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-theoretic_definition_of_na...
It seems to me that all of those things very much are abstractions. They are not the utmost level of abstraction, but they are abstractions!
(Actually "a contract," which at first I thought was the clearest win, I'm now not sure about. On reflection, it seems like a concretization, turning abstract ideas of trust and reliability into concrete conditions under which the contract has or has not been met.)
The notion is so fuzzy that everything can be an abstraction in a certain way. The word "abstraction" is a black hole for thoughts. Stay away from it.
For instance in this threads and in TFA, people made useful distinctions such as "generalization" or "indirection".
10 in a database record of a warehouse system may be an abstraction for 10 items of a given type in a warehouse.
They can do that too, but the cache miss cost already makes that expensive.
The author is relatively clear about good and bad, or rather pointless, abstractions.