[skohan]

> Surely the whole point of good system design is a set of logical abstractions, where you need to understand the logical model and not the internal details

In my opinion an important part of being a good programmer is understanding - at least at a broad level - how the set of abstractions you're working on top of work.

At the end of the day, our job is making computer hardware operate on data in memory. The more that we forget that, and think about computing as some abstract endeavor performed in Plato's heaven, the more tendency we have for bloat and inefficiency to creep into our various abstractions.

In other words, I think it's better to think about abstractions as a tool for interacting with hardware, not as something to save us from dealing with hardware.