Abstraction is considered a fundamental tenet of scalable engineering, and we often enforce abstraction through mechanisms like information hiding. The ability to enforce abstraction in this way is often considered an important language feature for large software projects, and when abstractions are security critical, this enforcement is mandatory.

However, real software engineers regularly, repeatedly and profitably violate abstraction (and information hiding). Mainstream program languages provide a variety of mechanisms for violating information hiding mechanisms, and languages that are too inflexible to allow such violations often force programmers to resort to techniques that are even worse than the disease.

We are investigating programming languages which allow abstraction to be violated in a principled way. Our approach is twofold: first, we want to describe large, existing software ecosystems (web browsers and extensions, operating systems, Emacs, etc) which exemplify an "open" universe of code, and understand why these systems have been as extensible as they have been. Second, we want to argue that existing, well-understood programming languages theory (compiler correctness, monads, continuations, dynamic scoping, etc) can serve as the foundation for programming languages which let you reach inside the black box, when you need to.