Abstraction is the only thing that makes any of our advancements possible. Not even the simplest of math theses could be proves without a “framework” of relevant lemmas, nor could you write even a single hello world without the layers upon layers of abstractions written carefully over the decades. Sure, there is also bad abstraction, but the problem is the bad part, not the concept itself.

Without abstractions you wouldn’t be able to read a text stored on a remote computer with accompanying style information displayed the same on both of our devices and with embedded 3D graphics doing the same thing on vastly differing devices be it a top of the line GPU or a simple low-end phone. Is it not abstraction?

Well, if the abstractions were peer reviewed and put through the same rigour as mathematical proofs, that's a whole different topic.

The equivalent would be a mathematical services company, who created "free" abstraction packages that required you to rewrite all your math, away from the scientific community standards, to fit their abstractions, and who also made money on consulting and selling books. And the big benefit of it all, is really that they only abstracted away writing summaries of your papers, which is actually the easiest part that is quite irrelevant to your research.

But it is not math - we only have empirical evidence and not even much from that.

Who is to tell whether the OSI model is ideal? It is more than likely not it, but we can’t measure these things up front, there is an insane cost associated with changing it, etc. Yet again, what is the alternative? We can’t manage complexity any other way, and essential complexity can’t be reduced.

> Who is to tell whether the OSI model is ideal?

The current idea of the OSI model was also retrofitted from what it originally was.

Ooo, you're giving me LaTeX vibes!

i mostly mean the heap of stuff people often throw at problems. of course you cant do anything without abstractions. it helps to understand them better though.

This is so backwards.

it really depends on what your doing mate!