[emodendroket]

Intuitively I find this view compelling, but I suppose it is somewhat arbitrary. After all, you can start in on integrated circuits and go many layers deeper from there to fundamental physics. And at the same time, we keep moving to higher and higher levels of abstraction with their own complexities to worry about and that's where most will end up working. Maybe the same curriculum doesn't quite make sense.

[rbongers]

I think it's very hard to use an abstraction effectively if you don't know why it exists and you think it's magic.

I have seen programmers who don't understand, for instance, how key/value stores are implemented, come up with all kinds of improbable explanation about what might be happening to their code when it goes wrong, because they blame the data structure. Perhaps they even know the old idiom "don't blame your tools", but they've reached the end of their knowledge - something must be going wrong because of that magic data structure. Meanwhile, it's some kind of side effect they missed. Magical thinking. Sure, they learn eventually what to do when something goes wrong with that data structure, but they come right back to the same problem with everything they don't understand. Taking the magic out of anything, even if not always directly used, is extremely powerful.

I didn't say this before but I also have experience down to the level of designing and building circuits. I think the bottom-up model falls apart here because thinking about the physical properties of electronics is much, much harder than just dealing with idealized logic gates. You can learn it later, but its application is extremely specialized in my opinion.

I don't know, maybe I am biased because of my learning path, maybe students don't need to go as deep, but I can't help but feel that if I did it anyone can.

[inimino]

I have always claimed that the best way to understand regexes is to implement them yourself. This goes for hashmaps and other basic data structures as well. In general this advice has been very poorly received.

Going to the lower level (building the digital from the electronic) is to cross a much more hermetic abstraction boundary, perhaps this is why it's less broadly useful.