Abstraction is the practice of peeling away the unnecessary, the unimportant, and the unwanted to arrive as some ideal, yet unreal representation of where you started. It happens in any discipline where we try to represent the real world in a fabricated realm of ideas or concepts. In computing, abstraction takes on a guise of making things better, clearer, easier to understand. This has its limits.
Abstraction is cumulative and the more detached from physical we get when doing virtual pantomimes of real things with decades of real history discovering, perfecting, and communicating the right way, the more accumulated complexity of programmers that don’t do the real thing inventing what they think is the right way have to solve to replace the real thing with the virtual thing.
All of virtualization is a stage play mystery where half the audience is asked to identify the Chesterton’s fence that was taken down to commit the murder in act 1, and the other half is asked to identify the purpose of the penguin in act 3.
Cthulhu wins.