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by sergiogjr 977 days ago
I think we have to make a discernment between operating and manufacturing when referring to knowing "how it works". The pilot needs to understand how a plane will behave on the fundamental level when given a set of instructions. A develop should have that understanding as well (and that's coming from a person who's been through CS, but have lost a lot of that understanding).
1 comments
BHSPitMonkey 976 days ago
But what the vast majority of programmers are "operating" are programming languages, runtime environments, and operating systems—which generally treat the hardware and the CPU architecture as implementation details. The people who use programming languages and those who create/maintain them might as well be in different industries, like the pilot and the aerospace engineer.
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austin-cheney 976 days ago
I think that misses the point. A programmer who understands both their language and the environmental constraints with which that language, and it’s capabilities, execute likely understands enough to write and maintain original applications in that language.

As a JavaScript/Web/Fullstack developer I don’t live in that world. I live in a world of giant stupid frameworks. The only purpose of these frameworks is to supply an architecture in a box and put text on screen in a web browser. If a task cannot be performed using only the API provided by that framework then it must not be worth doing as it’s clearly far beyond the capabilities of the developer. There is far more to this software platform than merely putting text on screen in a web browser, for example: accessibility, security, performance, test automation, A/B testing, network messaging, architecture, content management, and so on.

God forbid you take the giant stupid frameworks away. It’s like castrating a person in public and then laughing at their great embarrassment. Many developers, some of whom shouldn’t be in this line of work to begin with, have built their entire careers around some framework API and absolutely cannot write code without it. The emotional insecurity is very real, as well as the completely inability to write original applications.

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