[bitexploder]

These are good points. At some point architecture and systems like Redis will become the only tools that can reliably implement these behaviors if no one ever learns about bits. Similar to how hard it can be to outperform compilers in many areas when writing assembly by hand.

Then again there are programming disciplines where you have to know all of this and more. It ultimately comes back to those capable of implementing the tools/frameworks/compilers and those that just use them. Safe crypto libraries are impossible without bit wrangling.

I will still argue that having these skills has at times saved order of magnitudes of time for me. Maybe it wasn't worth all the effort I spent if it only saves time once in a while. Then again I haven't been a full time developer in like 11 years, now I break other peoples software for a living and bang bits together on a weekly basis :)