The Law of Leaky Abstractions

Putt’s Law is often followed by Putt’s Corollary:

These statements suggest that due to various selection criteria and trends in how groups organise, there will be a number of skilled people at working levels of a technical organisations, and a number of people in managerial roles who are not aware of the complexities and challenges of the work they are managing. One interesting element to this law is the suggestion that even by simplifying the entire system, the intrinsic complexity is not reduced, it is moved to the user, who must behave in a more complex way. The Law of Leaky Abstractions on Joel on Software

This law states that abstractions, which are generally used in computing to simplify working with complicated systems, will in certain situations ‘leak’ elements of the underlying system, this making the abstraction behave in an unexpected way.

Source: github.com