Basically he's saying that if the API is great you rarely need to read the implementation. To which: sure, in some blessed cases where the API was great to start with and nothing changed so you don't need to change the API or the implementation.
This is only (theoretically) true in the sense that if you build the perfect abstraction, you should not have to think too often about it.
Building good abstractions requires:
1. skill that is in relative terms rare in the profession;
2. enough experience with the problem domain that the abstraction provides the perfect balance between ease-of-use and flexibility as the context changes;
3. a dedicated individual or a small team who nurtures and gatekeeps the evolution of the abstraction obsessively.
For the other 99% of real world cases, the best you can do is try your best to build decent, not-too-leaky abstractions for the problem as you face it today, and the underlying code better be readable because you'll need to maintain it constantly, as will all kinds of other people in varying states of cluelessness.
"History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation."
OK, you've discovered post-modernism.
Next step is to avoid its pitfalls.
The actual factual events are infinite and one is exposed to a small subset to interpret. That does not mean you're allowed to make up, distort, and selectively ignore facts to suit whatever narrative you'd like to push. You need to construct the narrative in good faith, based on the best possible set of facts you're exposed to, and adjusting it when you're exposed to new facts.
Unless you want to organize a cult or a totalitarian regime, in which case go as crazy as possible with the narrative. People love it.
“The famed Brazilian coffee owes its existence to Francisco de Mello Palheta, who was sent by the emperor to French Guiana to get coffee seedlings.”
Small nitpick: at this time Brazil was a Portuguese colony and the monarch was called King John V, not an “emperor”. Brazil only got an emperor when it became independent about one century later.
Why did Peter, the son of a Portuguese King ruling over territories spanning 4 continents, decided to call himself an Emperor when ruling over a single (albeit large!) territory? I don’t know, ego?
Most of the comments here are assigning this as Plato's opinion.
I'd just like to point out that Plato very rarely wrote in his own voice so it's very hard to say if it's his views or not that are being expressed.
In this case however, this is almost certainly an expression of Socrates' views, not Plato's. Not only because it's in the voice of Socrates but also by what's transparent in their actions: Socrates didn't leave anything in writing and Plato left us arguably the most important written corpus of classic Greek philosophy.
Maybe he felt ambivalent about it, but he certainly thought there was a value in the writing.
> frankly you don't have enough information to say that there is no relation
I'm not a scholar of this subject. If there is good scholarship out there presenting good arguments in your direction I'll take it. I was just helping out a fellow that has a doubt with my best knowledge of the subject, which is not just a guess.
> has been used as a metaphor for the origin of things for thousands of years, even ancient Greece
Has it really? I'd love to see an example. Sure it's listed in the Bible along with a bunch of other place names, but as a metaphor for the origin of things?
Even if there are examples, I'd really love to see an etymological trace of how it would end up as a prefix. Was it used as such in ancient Greek? In Latin? Sounds like a folk etymology.
I spent two years in a rough-ish public school. It was the hardest period in my life but it taught me very much about valuing people from all walks of life and especially on adapting my behavior to get positive outcomes in any social setting. I can absolutely see how that experience is lacking on some of my friends that spent all their lives in protected environments.
Actually before the ":" specifically there should be a regular non-breaking space, not a narrow one. Except in Switzerland. Other punctuation marks take the narrow non-breaking space.
CORRECTION: narrow non-breaking space goes before ";", "!" and "?". Before ":" you should use regular non-breaking space. That is, in France. In French-speaking Switzerland it's a narrow non-breaking space everywhere.
This space before the colon and other marks in French should actually be a narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) [0]. There's no key for it in the AZERTY layout.
This has been a problem since the typewriter age. People having to get on with their jobs coped with it by using a full, breaking em-space. Unless this gets replaced automatically by the word processor, you get horrid typography and misplaced line breaks all over the place.
The Académie Française should have dealt with this years ago, if their ass wasn't stuck in the 17th century.