alt Hacker NewsWhen C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience.
Then the same happened with languages that managed memory.
And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls.
And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.
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It started before that. When assemblers came out, (some) programmers worried about losing touch with the machine if they didn't have to know the instructions in octal.
And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found some profiling tools, found the process was stuck in some dumb blocking call loop, resource was unavailable, and the rest was history.
So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve problems other people cannot.
I reckon there's a limit to how long this abstraction can go on before not understanding underlying mechanisms will seriously hamstring you.