The one ring problem: abstraction and our quest for power | Hugonweb Annotated Link Bibliography

"Design is figuring out how to find a point in the middle."

You cannot make an abstraction more powerful without sacrificing some properties that you used to know about it. Necessarily. You cannot require a new property be true about an abstraction without sacrificing some of its power and flexibility. Always.

The mistake is to forget this. Nearly always, this error happens in one direction. To look on a design, see what cannot be done with it, and attempt to “fix” it. To make it more powerful, and forget that it necessarily becomes more meaningless.