leaky abstraction

English

Etymology

Popularised in 2002 by software engineer Joel Spolsky.

Noun

leaky abstraction (plural leaky abstractions)

1. (software engineering) An abstraction that undesirably exposes details and limitations of its underlying implementation.
   • 2015, Suhas Chatekar, Learning NHibernate 4, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 291:

     This is a classic case of leaky abstraction. Repository is supposed to abstract away any concerns around querying the database, but now what we are doing here is returning an IQueryable<T> to the consuming code and asking it to build the queries, thus leaking the abstraction that is supposed to be hidden into repository.