By Tess |
January 29, 2024, edited August 09, 2024
an abstraction is a concept that allows you to understand or do stuff with a thing without caring specifically what the thing is.
suppose you're in the shipping industry. loading and unloading cargo is slow and unreliable because different goods needed to be handled differently. you have an idea: make every customer put their goods in containers with the same dimensions. now you can move the containers around. every container can be handled the same. your workers don't even need to know what's inside a given container, as long as they know what to do with it.
it's a way to think about cargo and talk about cargo, in general, reguardless of what type of cargo it is/will be.
it's just some metal welded together.
a paragraph is not an abstraction (it's a collection of words), but the concept of a paragraph is. Joe Biden is not an abstraction, but "Democrat" is
vehicles are an abstraction over cars, trucks, trains, etc, each of which is an abstraction themselves over specific makes and models which are abstractions over all the individual hunks of metal.
"political party" is an abstraction over Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, etc, which are each abstractions over members of that party and the ideology itself, which are themselves abstractions over the specific people and ideas.
you can tell someone to write a paragraph without knowing exactly what words it will contain. you can predict how a democrat will vote without knowing the details of their opinions.