Quotes About Abstraction

Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts ; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.

This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

A class, in Java, is where we teach objects how to behave.

Until these interviews, it had been a theoretical question—an abstraction, not grounded in the facts of the investigation. But now there was evidence to make the issue real: Could Mueller—could any federal prosecutor—indict a sitting president of the United States?

Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder.

Rothko's paintings consist of strong formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale.

They explored the nature of visual representation by reducing images to their essential elements of form, line, color, or light.

I remember [Meyer] Schapiro telling us that before Cézanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cézanne's landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping. Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage

uncomputable numbers

had explicitly been concerned to treat mathematics as if it were a chess game, without asking for a connection with the world. That question was, as it were, always left for someone else to tackle.

By coding at a higher level of abstraction, you are free to concentrate on solving domain problems, and can ignore petty implementation details.

Maths should be more practical and more conceptual, but less mechanical.

I've always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing any idea.

In modern life we move from one insulated igloo to another...serially abstracting ourselves from nature and its impacts.

According to Korzybski, differentiating orders of abstraction also included distinguishing between (a) descriptions of experiences and (b) inferences (conclusions drawn from our experiences and our descriptions of those experiences); and between descriptions about descriptions, inferences based upon other inferences, affect about affect (feelings about other feelings), and between one person's abstractions and another person's abstractions, etc.

If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I find it the lesser chaos.

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose. Clean code never obscures the designer's intent but rather is full of crisp abstractions and straightforward lines of control. - Grady Booch author of Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications

if I must encode either the interface or the implementation, I choose the implementation. Calling it ShapeFactoryImp, or even the hideous CShapeFactory, is preferable to encoding the interface.

abstraction is evil. Code is anti-evil, and clean code is perhaps divine.

Factories are a complexity that can often be avoided, especially in the early phases of an evolving design.

In general, it is harmful to depend on modules that contain more than you need. This is obviously true for source code dependencies that can force unnecessary recompilation and redeployment—but it is also true at a much higher, architectural level.

Don't refer to volatile concrete classes. Refer to abstract interfaces instead. This rule applies in all languages, whether statically or dynamically typed. It also puts severe constraints on the creation of objects and generally enforces the use of Abstract Factories.