[skermes]

When I spend all day hopping up and down through different levels of abstraction in the service of building some particular program, it's all too easy to start confusing the map with the territory. If I'm writing some code to draw a circle, I might also have the circle stored on disk in a file that lists a (center, radius) pair, and I might be passing it around in memory as an IDrawable object for someone else's code to consume and I'm putting it on the screen wit pixels and so on and so on and at a certain point it does become useful to have someone remind me that none of those things are really the same circle, or really circles at all, but all representations of some Platonic circle that doesn't actually exist in my code. This problem gets worse when more than one programmer is involved. How many arguments have we seen between two people who agree with each other, but can't tell because they're stuck arguing over whether (center, radius) or a pixel group is "the real circle"?

So no, it's not of much value in that it doesn't tell us anything that we don't already know. But it can be of value to frame our understanding or discussion of the problem.