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And if you don't understand how physics works, you will never understand how your hardware works… ad infinitum. It's a weak argument for me, if I'm honest. Lea

And if you don't understand how physics works, you will never understand how your hardware works… ad infinitum. It's a weak argument for me, if I'm honest. Learning how a compiler works is interesting and provides useful insight into how other parts of the stack work. But it seems like a falsehood to suggest that it's not possible to understand one level of abstraction without knowing the full stack; isn't that why we have abstractions in the first place?

khedoros 10y ago
> But it seems like a falsehood to suggest that it's not possible to understand one level of abstraction without knowing the full stack; isn't that why we have abstractions in the first place? Any non-trivial abstraction will have some leaks. You can memorize the problem cases and usefully use the abstraction without understanding the source of the leaks. Partial understanding can be sufficient. Fully understanding an abstraction probably requires you to understand all the levels of the stack. Is it actually useful to know the stack top-to-bottom like that? Not always. As you note, that's why we cover up the details in the first place, so that we don't always have to keep the underlying implementation in mind.