[excepttheweasel]

"Perhaps, because we always had autoloading as a crutch, our existing knowledge has atrophied – or never even developed – putting us at an even greater disadvantage."

I think the same can be said of any abstraction. The Ruby programming language as an abstraction over C. C as an abstraction over assembler. etc. Yet few people write code in assembler. I don't find this a very compelling argument.

[grossvogel]

I think the post describes a way in which this particular abstraction is "leaky." We have to hope that the abstractions we rely on every day are less leaky and thus allow us to get by without intimate knowledge of the underlying complexity.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...