[dktnj]

Probably the wrong way to look at it. Digital electronics doesn't really exist outside of theoretical spaces. It's all analogue underneath and any experienced digital designer will know that and what the consequences for things like signal integrity, noise immunity and latency.

[tonmoy]

It’s all about layers of abstraction. A web developer doesn’t need to know about analog circuits to program computers

[II2II]

It's better to describe analog and digital electronics as a subset of electronics. For the most part, they look at different domains. Even though they are based upon the same underlying principles, the simplifying assumptions are different. A more dramatic example is with RF electronics. While it may look like you are dealing with the same sort of things as the more common low frequency analog electronics, you are going to have a difficult time coaxing an analog circuit to work in the RF domain.

Contrast that to web developers. They are dealing with very different principles from web browser developers, who are mostly working with different principles than operating system developers, who are working with entirely different principles from those who design hardware. It's not that they are working with a different subset of the same thing because one layer of abstraction is directly on top of the one below it and (ideally) the layers below completely hide how they work from the layers above.

[dktnj]

That's a vast difference in the number of layers of abstraction though. Digital electronics is not.

[dragontamer]

I mean... Analog electronics doesn't exist either, or for that matter, electronics in general.

All of electronics assumes Kirchhoff's Current Law and Kirchoff's Voltage law, which does not truly exist in reality. Electrons often escape a circuit (see antennas, which throw the voltage / current into a wave that is emitted out of your designs). All wires are antennas, so even the most basic circuit doesn't have all the current return in a loop.

The assumptions of KVL and KCL are just over-simplifications of true physics, Maxwell's equations. Because working with Maxwell's equations directly is too much effort in practice.

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Electronics itself is a huge abstraction upon physics. You could, in theory, calculate all the voltages and currents using Maxwell's equations, except this isn't useful at all.

Similarly: most of "Analog Electronics" uses simplifications as well: OpAmps are often assumed to be ideal (aka: infinite gain), which is good enough in most cases.

[anthk]

This. Digital is not that "discrete" as it looks, but just a threshold of values. FFT works on this pretty well, it's the basics.