Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

leaky abstraction

Word Rarity Rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.86 in modern English

Syllables: leaky ab-strac-tion
IPA

27

Scrabble Score

16

Letters

3

Syllables

13

Unique Chars

Meaning

noun

An abstraction that undesirably exposes details and limitations of its underlying implementation.

Example Sentences

"This is a classic case of leaky abstraction. Repository is supposed to abstract away any concerns around querying the database, but now what we are doing here is returning an IQueryable to the consuming code and asking it to build the queries, thus leaking the abstraction that is supposed to be hidden into repository."

Etymology

Popularised in 2002 by software engineer Joel Spolsky.

Inflected Forms

leaky abstractions (plural)

Questions

What does leaky abstraction mean?: An abstraction that undesirably exposes details and limitations of its underlying implementation.
Where does leaky abstraction come from?: Popularised in 2002 by software engineer Joel Spolsky.

How to pronounce leaky abstraction

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