The first thing with which one is confronted when writing programs is the problem. Typically you are confronted with ``real-life'' problems and you want to make life easier by providing a program for the problem. However, real-life problems are nebulous and the first thing you have to do is to try to understand the problem to separate necessary from unnecessary details: You try to obtain your own abstract view, or model, of the problem.
The first thing with which one is confronted when writing programs is the problem. Typically you are confronted with ``real-life'' problems and you want to make life easier by providing a program for the problem. However, real-life problems are nebulous and the first thing you have to do is to try to understand the problem to separate necessary from unnecessary details: You try to obtain your own abstract view, or model, of the problem. This process of modeling is called abstraction.