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by oldenlessons
335 days ago
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Nothing has served me better over the past few decades than accumulating ever more detailed and accurate knowledge of what it is exactly that computers do under the hood. All the layers of abstraction are well intended and often useful. But they by no means eliminate the need to understand in detail the hard facts underlying computer engineering if you want to build performant and reliable software. You can trade that off at different rates for different circumstances but the notion that you can do away entirely with the need to know these details has never been true. More people being enabled to think less about these details necessitates more expertise to exist to support them, never less. |
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Agreed. A good abstraction usually doesn't obviate the need for understanding what's going on behind the scenes, it just means that I don't have to think about it all the time.
As a more extreme example, I don't usually think about the fact that the Java (or Kotlin, Scala, ...) compiler generates bytecode that runs in an interpreter that translates the bytecode to machine code on the fly. But sometimes it's useful to remember (e.g. when dealing with instrumentation).
Another example are things like databases, or concurrency constructs, etc. There it's usually good to know the properties they guarantee and one way to be able to reason through these is by having some understanding of how they're implemented under the hood.