The Law of Leaky Abstractions
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
November 11, 2002October 5, 2018 by Joel Spolsky The Law of Leaky Abstractions Top 10, Rock star developer, News There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP is a way to transmit data that is reliable. By this I mean: if you send a message over a network using TCP, it will arrive, and it won’t be garbled or corrupted. We use TCP for many things like fetching web pages and sending email. The reliability of TCP is why every email arrives in letter-perfect condition. Even if it’s just some dumb spam. By comparison, there is another method of transmitting data called IP which is unreliable.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Joel on Software.