Every once in a while, I run across a fabulous article that Joel (Spolsky of Joel on Software fame) wrote a while back that I’ve yet to read. This is one of those articles. In this article, Joel reminds us that, sometimes, the complexity beneath our abstractions leaks through and can cause us a world of hurt if we don’t understand those complex things going on underneath.

This has bitten me in the past with Hibernate. Hibernate abstracts the database away from us Java developers. It’s a wonderful tool, and it handles a ton of complexity under the covers, but that level of abstraction can come at a high price when you spend 2 weeks debugging what should be a simple problem. Unfortunately, if you don’t understand all of the things that Hibernate is trying to abstract away, you end up doing stupid things that you never would’ve done had you been using JDBC, for example.

Someone once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” As software developers, we have a responsibility to at least understand the complexities that our powerful abstractions hide from us, or we are doomed to a life of debugging problems that never should’ve existed. For our first lesson, here’s a link to another Joel article that reminds us that string handling is very hard under the covers (it’s crazy that I can call C programming ‘under the covers’ these days). Aren’t you glad we have ruby, python, java, etc.?