[groby_b]

Not sure if he talked about photography, Desktop Publishing, spreadsheets, or some other labor-saving invention.

But what I heard over the din of whining was "It was hard for me, it should be hard for you". And... that's not how this or anything works. You get labor-saving stuff, you choose if you want to continue to solve hard problems, or if you want the same problems (which suddenly turned easy).

Yes, it's not perfect. Yes, you need to know how you use it, and misusing it causes horrible disfiguring incidents. Guess what, the same was true about C++. And C before it. And that new-fangled assembly stuff, instead of using blinkenlights like a real programmer. And computers instead of slide rules.

Up the complexity ladder we keep going.

[sgarland]

No, you missed the point entirely. The author was correctly pointing out that if you don’t struggle, you will not understand how things work. Claim otherwise all you want; centuries of pedagogy have proven this time and time again. You have to understand the fundamentals to grok the abstractions, and you have to fail to know why the successes worked.