Leaky Communication
Have you ever heard of these phrases:
- Leaky abstraction
- Worse is better
- Model-View-Controller
- Web Services
Now, think about them a little bit. What do they really mean?
No, no, no, don't hit the F9 key for Google! Better yet, print this page out and turn off your browser. Write down on a piece of paper what you think they mean. Hand the list to ten other people and have them do the same thing.
Now compare your answers. Would you be surprised if the answers are all different? I wouldn't.
Words mean things. However, we have overloaded words with so many different meanings it is hard to pin them down. And when we communicate with these catch phrases, we run the risk of leaky communication---you've communicated the words, but not the meaning you want to convey.
Re: Leaky Communication
"Leaky abstraction" is just dumb IMO. I've read Joel's article several times and it borders on nonsense and a poor understanding of the relationship between programming and abstractions. (Hint: people don't program with abstractions.) Web services is a marketing term composed of two other marketing terms which makes it four times as bad. On the other hand, MVC is a well defined design principle and "worse is better" is a well defined engineering principle. I agree with the gist of your post though. It's amazing how imprecise developers are in their terminology. Particularly in blog-land!