[gv83]

> We're forgetting how to look under the hood and understand "why something works".

But under the hood there is a hood. And under that hood there is another hood. And under that hood there is a brand new car you don't know how to open the hood, and so on.

I cannot devote my life to know everything or I won't be able to provide for my family.

[keyle]

If you don't understand "why something works" then you will certainly not be able to answer "why it doesn't work".

Every high level library is an abstraction and abstractions are leaky.

I'm not saying you have to be able to write assembly by hand. I'm saying you should understand why your code runs 10x slower in docker.

[rajamaka]

I'm interested in what's under the hood but after working full time scrubbing the bonnet, my motivation is mostly gone.

[flohofwoe]

You don't need to know every little detail, but having at least a basic understanding how the machinery works (and keeping that knowledge somewhat uptodate), and also being able to verify that the machine actually does what you expect it to do is useful for all programmers, because it lets you write code that works in harmony with the hardware instead of fighting it.

(besides, learning to read a bit of assembly code never hurt anyone)

[_joel]

"It's hoods, all the way down..."

[MrYellowP]

No. Flat out wrong. There is only a small amount of fundamental understanding that needs to be acquired to actually know what your code is actually doing.

Knowing how things work fundamentally is what matters the most, as everything else can be inferred and deduced from that. This is universally true. When you know how something works, you can build up on that.

There's no value for a programmer below how processors work with registers, caches and bus accesses. The most fundamental interface between the programmer and the computer are the registers, caches and interrupts, which make everything else happen.

Understanding how these are being used practically and properly covers a LOT of ground to build up upon.

On the other side you have the people who are fully dependent on compilers to do their job for them. They don't write code for the machine, they write code for the tool.

They don't actually know what they're doing, they have no idea how it works and they believe that the compiler optimizes it all properly anyway, as if it's magic, with no fucking clue what the fuck they're actually doing, while patting themselves on the back for living in dependency.

Why do programmers need garbage collection? Because people have no idea how not to need it. Why are pointers considered bad? Because some assholes decided that telling everyone they're too complex to use was a smart idea instead of teaching them properly, which, of course, it fucking wasn't.

If people would actually know how to do proper memory management, we'd had far less security issues from the get go instead of requiring patches for software that was written in a stupid way, ignorant of memory mapping, pages, etc ... you know, fundamental knowledge and understanding of what's actually happening.

It is considered brilliant to use mmap for faster, more memory efficient file access ... which is absolutely ridiculous, because it exposes how little programmers actually know about the fundamentals!

Using mmap for sharing information between processes and reading and writing files has been my go-to since forever, simply because every other way is literally doing it wrong.

Anyone saying that not every programmer needs to know all of this is missing the point. Of course you don't need to, but the status quo is built upon exactly that line of thinking.

Are you better off being able to, at least moderately, repair your car yourself, or are you better off depending on someone else to do it? The answer is obvious, and the same applies to literally everything.

Less dependency should always be the top priority, because less dependency leads to better understanding and increased freedom ... but we're living in a world that's doing the exact opposite.

Gonna stop writing now, because there's no end to this.

[gv83]

I never had the chance to work at the lower levels you seem to have worked with; in any case I don't disagree in principle with your points (and understand some part of the fundamental understanding you mention), but less dependency leads to wheel reinventing which is completely unsustainable in the long run, specially if you need to maximize the value you bring to the table. It has been like this for every field; how can we call this, industrialization?