[yesimahuman]

Understanding magic means you understand the concepts. It's a very advanced position to be in relative to your programming education.

I'm guessing it's also why "hard" classes in school start with the concepts rather than the magic (physics is a perfect example). You can't really go far if you don't get the concepts.

I've been doing some training lately for new hires, and I am inclined to start with the concepts and then teach the magic, but I wonder if it's the most effective way to learn in the short term?

[rplacd]

Don't fear abstraction - that's as far as we'll get in plenty of cases, especially when we're talking about the epistemology of the sciences; in any case, there's always an element of human control involved - once opinionated humans are put in charge of articulating abstractions, we tend towards elegance, orthogonality, the stuff that makes you grin.

Fear leaky abstractions, though.