Unless you're two hundred years old, you joined the development of this technology in the middle. There was already decades of progress in electronics and telecommunications theory and engineering that everything you listed was built on top of. Your predecessors likely thought it was all newfangled abstractions that obscured more fundamental knowledge, and your successors will think the same about whatever world they grew up in vs. whatever one they leave.
Abstractions are only relevant when they are leaky. People alive today were flipping toggle switches to load individual machine codes into memory. Some of them literally knew what every single transistor in the machine was designed to do.
Programmers at the time went from thinking these kit computers are toys to watching all the old ideas like virtual memory, cache, pipelining, networking, and multiple cores get reintroduced as the anemic transistor budget exploded. None of it was particularly novel, but the slow introduction of older ideas was a great way to learn all this stuff from the ground up.
That's the kind of argumentation the article argues against. There's a middle ground. Or, if you prefer, there's an optimum somewhere, and right now, we're on a descending slope.
To build mobile phones, we need a lot of tech built on tech build on tech. Dwarfs on giant's shoulders. And there's a place for people who don't understand the underlying tech. I've got a colleague who doesn't understand any of it, yet can do useful frontend work. But when you stand too high above the ground, the problems in the article become real, and that will get us stuck.
I don't need to know assembly to write a web app - it's totally magic, and it's fine.
However, if I am using an abstraction like an ORM without understanding what is happening with the database under the hood, or why it's getting slow all of a sudden, it is bound to bite me in the ass.
I shudder to think of how much money and energy the world is burning every second just because of this one alone.
A client of mine is enduring growth induced ORM hell right now. The struggle and existential threat is real.
It can take days for them to even track an evil SQL query back to the actual code. There were fetch-one calls that literally carry a million rows back over the wire for that one returned entity. Indices get skipped due to the magic translation of a row.col.toUpper()=="STRING" into SQL.. when the db collation is case insensitive in the first place.
But hey, the devs don't need to know SQL, so there's that.
Exactly. How far should we take this? Should you learn how to build a processor from vacuum tubes before understanding the abstraction of silicon? Build the power plant to power the whole thing and lay the wires?
Specialization always exists in an industrial society.
