Abstraction in Programming

Abstraction is one of the most important concepts in programming. It is hard to write quality code in a programming language without a deep understanding of this concept.

Abstraction is: “the purposeful suppression or hiding of some detail of a process or artifact in order to bring out more clearly other aspects details or structure” Timothy A. Budd.

A real-life example

Let’s see an example of how we use abstraction daily.
Think for a moment, what is a cellphone for you?

Usually, you will get something like this as an answer: a cellphone is an electronic device. You can input cellphone numbers and make calls. Also, cellphones have a screen and a battery.

The previous information is enough to use a cellphone. We don’t need more details on the components for us to use it. For instance, we don’t need to know the material that was used to build the phone.

If we try to draw what we understand for a cellphone, we can see something like the picture below.

The figure above shows us a model that we created in our mind about what a cellphone is. This model is enough for us to have a good understanding of how to use a cellphone.
As you can see now, we use abstractions daily.

Read more in this link.