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---
title: Modularity & Abstraction (working title)
author: Chris Hodapp
date: April 20, 2017
tags:
- technobabble
- rambling
draft: true
---
# Why don't I turn this into a paper for arXiv too? It can still be
# posted to the blog (just also make it exportable to LaTeX perhaps)
_Modularity_ and _abstraction_ feature prominently wherever computers
are involved. This is meant very broadly: it applies to designing
software, using software, integrating software, and to a lot of
hardware as well. It applies elsewhere, and almost certainly
originated elsewhere first, however, it appears especially crucial
around software.
Definitions, though, are a bit vague (including anything in this
post). My goal in this post isn't to try to (re)define them, but to
explain their essence and expand on a few theses:
- Modularity arises naturally in a wide array of places.
- Modularity and abstraction are intrinsically connected.
- Both are for the benefit of people. This usually doesn't need
stated, but to echo Paul Graham and probably others: to the
computer, it is all the same.
- More specifically, both are there to manage *complexity* by
assigning meaningful information and boundaries which allow people
to match a problem to what they can actually think about.
# - Whether a given modularization makes sense depends strongly on
# meaning and relevance of *information* inside and outside of
# modules, and broad context matters to those.
* Why?
People generally agree that "modularity" is good. The idea that
something complex can be designed and understood in terms of smaller,
simpler pieces comes naturally to anyone that has built something out
of smaller pieces or taken something apart. (This isn't to say that
reductionism is the best way to understand everything, but that's
another matter.) It runs very deep in the Unix philosophy, which ESR
gives a good overview of in [[http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html][The Art of Unix Programming]] - or, listen
to it from [[https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t%3D248][Kernighan himself]] at Bell Labs in
1982.
Tim Berners-Lee gives some practical limitations in [[https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html][Principles of
Design]] and in [[https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Modularity.html][Modularity]]: "Modular design hinges on the simplicity and
abstract nature of the interface definition between the modules. A
design in which the insides of each module need to know all about each
other is not a modular design but an arbitrary partitioning of the
bits... It is not only necessary to make sure your own system is
designed to be made of modular parts. It is also necessary to realize
that your own system, no matter how big and wonderful it seems now,
should always be designed to be a part of another larger system." Les
Hatton in [[http://www.leshatton.org/TAIC2008-29-08-2008.html][The role of empiricism in improving the reliability of
future software]] even did an interesting derivation tying the defect
density in software to how it is broken into pieces. The 1972 paper
[[https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~eos/cs651/papers/parnas72.pdf][On the Criteria to be Used in Decomposing System into Modules]] cites a
1970 textbook on why modularity is important in systems programming,
but also notes that nothing is said on how to divide a systems into
modules.
"Abstraction" doesn't have quite the same consensus. In software, it's
generally understood that decoupled or loosely-coupled is better than
tightly-coupled, but at the same time, "abstraction" can have the
connotation of something that gets in the way, adds overhead, and
confuses things. Dijkstra, in one of few instances of not being
snarky, allegedly said, "Being abstract is something profoundly
different from being vague. The purpose of abstraction is not to be
vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be
absolutely precise." Joel Spolsky, in one of few instances of me
actually caring what he said, also has a blog post from 2002 on the
[[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/][Law of Leaky Abstractions]] ("All non-trivial abstractions, to some
degree, are leaky.") The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege][principle of least privilege]] is likewise a
thing. So, abstraction too has its practical and theoretical
limitations.
* How They Relate
I bring these up together because: *abstractions* are the boundaries
between *modules*, and the communication channels (APIs, languages,
interfaces, protocols) through which they talk. It need not
necessarily be a standardized interface or a well-documented boundary,
though that helps.
Available abstractions vary. They vary by, for instance:
- ...what language you choose. Consider, for instance, that a language
like Haskell contains various abstractions done largely within the
type system that cannot be expressed in many other languages.
Languages like Python, Ruby, or JavaScript might have various
abstractions meaningful only in the context of dynamic typing. Some
languages more readily permit the creation of new abstractions, and
this might lead to a broader range of abstractions implemented in
libraries.
- ...the operating system and its standard library. What is a
process? What is a thread? What is a dynamic library? What is a
filesystem? What is a file? What is a block device? What is a
socket? What is a virtual machine? What is a bus? What is a
commandline?
- ...the time period. How many of the abstractions named above were
around or viable in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000? In the opposite
direction, when did you last use that lovely standardized protocol,
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface][CGI]], to let your web application and your web server communicate,
use [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHIGS][PHIGS]] to render graphics, or access a large multiuser system
via hard-wired terminals?
As such: Possible ways to modularize things vary. It may make no
sense that certain ways of modularization even can or should exist
until it's been done other ways hundreds or thousands of times.
Other terms are related too. "Loosely-coupled" (or loose coupling)
and "tightly-coupled" refer to the sort of abstractions sitting
between modules, or whether or not there even are separate modules.
"Decoupling" involves changing the relationship between modules
(sometimes, creating them in the first place), typically splitting
things into two more sensible pieces that a more sensible abstraction
separates. "Factoring out" is really a form of decoupling in which
smaller parts of something are turned into a module which the original
thing then interfaces with (one canonical example is taking some bits
of code, often that are very similar or identical in many places, and
moving them into a single function). To say one has "abstracted over"
some details implies that a module is handling those details, that the
details shouldn't matter, and what does matter is the abstraction one
is using.
One of Rich Hickey's favorite topics is *composition*, and with good
reason (and you should check out [[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/][Simple Made Easy]] regardless). This
relates as well: to *compose* things together effectively into bigger
parts requires that they support some common abstraction.
In the same area, [[https://clojurefun.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/composition-over-convention/][Composition over convention]] is a good read on how
/frameworks/ run counter to modularity: they aren't built to behave
like modules of a larger system.
# -----
It has a very pragmatic reason behind it: When something is a module
unto itself, presumably it is relying on specific abstractions, and it
is possible to freely change this module's internal details (provided
that it still respects the same abstractions), to move this module to
other contexts (anywhere that provides the same abstractions), and to
replace it with other modules (anything that respects the same
abstractions).
It also has a more abstract reason: When something is a module unto
itself, the way it is designed and implemented usually presents more
insight into the fundamentals of the problem it is solving. It
contains fewer incidental details, and more essential details.
# -------
* Information
I referred earlier to the abstractions themselves as both boundaries
and communications channels. Another common view is that abstractions
are *contracts* with a communicated and agreed purpose, and I think
this is a useful definition too: it conveys the notion that there are
multiple parties involved and that they are free to behave as needed
provided that they fulfill some obligation
Some definitions refer directly to information, like the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_principle_(computer_programming)][abstraction
principle]] which aims to reduce duplication of information which fits
with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%2527t_repeat_yourself][don't repeat yourself]] so that "a modification of any single
element of a system does not require a change in other logically
unrelated elements".
# ----- FIXME
Consider the information this module deals in, in essence.
What is the most general form this information could be expressed in,
without being so general as to encompass other things that are
irrelevant or so low-level as to needlessly constrain the possible
contexts?
(Aristotle's theory of definitions?)
* Less-Conventional Examples
One thing I've watched with some interest is when new abstractions
emerge (or, perhaps, old ones become more widespread) to solve
problems that I wasn't even aware existed.
[[https://circleci.com/blog/it-really-is-the-future/][It really is the future]] talks about a lot of more recent forms of
modularity from the land of devops, most of which were completely
unheard-of in, say, 2010. [[https://www.functionalgeekery.com/episode-75-eric-b-merritt/][Functional Geekery episode 75]] talks about
many similar things.
[[https://jupyter.org/][Jupyter Notebook]] is one of my favorites here. It provides a notebook
interface (similar to something like Maple or Mathematica) which:
- allows the notebook to use various different programming languages
underneath,
- decouples where the notebook is used and where it is running, due to
being implemented as a web application accessed through the browser,
- decouples the presentation of a stored notebook from Jupyter itself
by using a [[https://nbformat.readthedocs.io/en/latest/][JSON-based file format]] which can be rendered without
Jupyter (like GitHub does if you commit a .ipynb file).
I love notebook interfaces already because they simplify experimenting
by handling a lot of things I'd otherwise have to do manually - like
saving results and keeping them lined up with the exact code that
produced them. Jupyter adds some other use-cases I find marvelous -
for instance, I can let the interpreter run on my workstation which
has all of the computing power, but I can access it across the
Internet from my laptop.
[[https://zeppelin.apache.org/][Apache Zeppelin]] does similar things with different languages; I've
just used it much less.
Another favorite of mine is [[https://nixos.org/nix/][Nix]]. One excellent article, [[http://blog.ezyang.com/2014/08/the-fundamental-problem-of-programming-language-package-management/][The
fundamental problem of programming language package management]],
doesn't ever mention Nix but explains very well the problems it sets
out to solve. To be able to combine nearly all of the
programming-language specific package managers into a single module is
a very lofty goal, but Nix appears to do a decent job of it (among
other things).
The [[https://www.lua.org/][Lua]] programming language is noteworthy here. It's written in
clean C with minimal dependencies, so it runs nearly anywhere that a C
or C++ compiler targets. It's purposely very easy both to *embed*
(i.e. to put inside of a program and use as an extension language,
such as for plugins or scripting) and to *extend* (i.e. to connect
with libraries to allow their functionality to be used from Lua). [[https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/][GNU
Guile]] has many of the same properties, I'm told.
We ordinarily think of object systems as something living in the
programming language. However, the object system is sometimes made a
module that is outside of the programming language, and languages just
interact with it. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GObject][GObject]], [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model][COM]], and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPCOM][XPCOM]] do this, and to some
extent, so does [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-object_System][Qt & MOC]] - and there are probably hundreds of others,
particularly if you allow dead ones created during the object-oriented
hype of the '90s. This seems to happen in systems where the object
hierarchy is in effect "bigger" than the language.
[[https://zeromq.org/][ZeroMQ]] is another example: a set of cross-language abstractions for
communication patterns in a distributed system. I know it's likely
not unique, but it is one of the better-known and the first I thought
of, and I think their [[http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all][guide]] is excellent.
Interestingly, the same iMatix behind ZeroMQ also created [[https://github.com/imatix/gsl][GSL]] and
explained its value in [[https://imatix-legacy.github.io/mop/introduction.html][Model-Oriented Programming]], for which
abstraction features heavily. I've not used GSL, and am skeptical of
its stated usefulness, but it looks like it is meant to help create
compile-time abstractions that likewise sit outside of any particular
programming language.
# TODO: Expand on this.
[[https://web.hypothes.is/][hypothes.is]] is a curious one that I find fascinating. They're trying
to factor out annotation and commenting from something that is handled
on a per-webpage basis and turn it into its own module, and I really
like what I've seen. However, it does not seem to have caught on
much.
The Unix tradition lives on in certain modern tools. [[https://stedolan.github.io/jq/][jq]] has proven
very useful anytime I've had to mess with JSON data. [[http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/][socat]] and [[http://netcat.sourceforge.net/][netcat]]
have saved me numerous times. I'm sure certain people love the fact
that [[https://neovim.io/][Neovim]] is designed to be seamlessly embedded and to extend with
plugins. [[https://suckless.org/philosophy][suckless]] perhaps takes it too far, but gets an honorary
mention...
# ???
# Also, TCP/IP and the entire notion of packet-switched networks.
# And the entire OSI 7-layer model.
# Also, caches - of all types. (CPU, disk...)
# One key is how the above let you *reason* about things without
# knowing their specifics.
People know that I love Emacs, but I also do believe many of the
complaints on how large it is. Despite that it is basically its own
operating system, /within this/ it has considerable modularity. The
same applies somewhat to Blender, I suppose.
Consider [[https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html][Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt]],
a paper that anyone working around machine learning should read and
re-read regularly. Large parts of the paper are about ways in which
machine learning conflicts with proper modularity and abstraction.
(However, [[https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types-FP/][Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming]] is still
a good post and shows some sorts of abstraction that still exist
at least in neural networks.)
Even DOS had useful abstractions. Things like
DriveSpace/DoubleSpace/Stacker worked well enough because most
software that needed files relied on DOS's normal abstractions to
access them - so it did not matter to them that the underlying
filesystem was actually compressed, or was actually a RAM disk, or was
on some obscure SCSI interface. Likewise, for the silliness known as
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory][EMS]], applications that accessed memory through the EMS abstraction
could disregard whether it was a "real" EMS board providing access to
that memory, whether it was an expanded memory manager providing
indirect access to some other memory or even to a hard disk pretending
to be memory.
Even more abstractly: emulators work because so much software
respected the abstraction of some specific CPU and hardware platform.
Submitted without further comment:
https://github.com/stevemao/left-pad/issues/4
* Fragments
- Abstracting over...
- Multiple applications
- Multiple users
- Multiple CPUs
- Multiple hosts
- [[Notes - Paper, 2016-11-13]]
- Tanenbaum vs. Linus war & microkernels
- TBL: "The choice of language is a common design choice. The low
power end of the scale is typically simpler to design, implement and
use, but the high power end of the scale has all the attraction of
being an open-ended hook into which anything can be placed: a door
to uses bounded only by the imagination of the programmer. Computer
Science in the 1960s to 80s spent a lot of effort making languages
which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate
the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least
powerful. The reason for this is that the less powerful the
language, the more you can do with the data stored in that
language. If you write it in a simple declarative from, anyone can
write a program to analyze it in many ways." (Languages are a kind
of abstraction - one that influences how a module is written, and
what contexts it is useful in.)
- "Self" paper & structural reification?
- I'm still not sure how this relates, but it may perhaps relate to
how *not* to make things modular (structural reification is a sort
of check on the scope of objects/classes)
- What by Rich Hickey?
- Simple Made Easy?
- The Value of Values?
- SICP: [[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-19.html#%25_chap_3][Modularity, Objects, and State]]
- [[https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf][On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited]]
- http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/apb.html#Baldwin-Clark -
Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark. Design Rules, Vol 1: The Power of
Modularity. 2000. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-024667.
- Brooks, No Silver Bullet?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_complexity
- https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/962074070513631232
- [[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-9.html#%25_chap_1][From SICP chapter 1 intro]]: "The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts
its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining
several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex
ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple
or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take
a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it
gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them
from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence:
this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are
made." -John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
- One point I have ignored (maybe): You clearly separate the 'inside'
of a module (its implementation) from the 'outside' (that is - its
boundaries, the abstractions that it interfaces with or that it
implements) so that the 'inside' can change more or less freely
without having any effect on the outside.
- Abstractions as a way of reducing the work required to add
functionality (changes can be made just in the relevant modules, and
other modules do not need to change to conform)
- What is more key? Communication, information content, contracts,
details?
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%2527t_repeat_yourself][Don't repeat yourself]]
- [[https://simplyphilosophy.org/study/aristotles-definitions/][Aristotle & theory of definitions]]
- this isn't right. I need to find the quote in the Durant book
(which will probably have an actual source) that pertains to how
specific and how general a definition must be
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID][SOLID]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-cutting_concern][Cross-cutting concerns]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming][Aspect-oriented programming]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns][Separation of Concerns]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_principle_(computer_programming)][Abstraction principle]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%2527t_repeat_yourself][Don't repeat yourself]]
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