One of the greatest tools to tame complexity in a growing codebase, growing either via lines of code or via people, is through strategic information hiding — you may know this as encapsulation, modularization, or data abstraction. In this post, we'll explore data abstraction's definition and capabilities from a formal perspective and show to what extent we can achieve the ideal through Swift, TypeScript, OCaml, ReasonML, Rust, and Haskell. Knowing how to use data abstraction in your language of choice is important in the short term, but understanding and naming the general concepts equips you to understand these tools as our languages evolve and change.
Data abstraction is about abstracting away the details of data structures and manipulating them at will, so that you don't have to worry about their internals anymore. It's not just about avoiding memory leaks, it's also about avoiding having to think about the underlying representation of those values in the first place. This allows for more flexibility when