>The essence of programming is being capable of constantly walking up and down the abstraction ladder ... it's good to be able to step down and verify what's go

>The essence of programming is being capable of constantly walking up and down the abstraction ladder ... it's good to be able to step down and verify what's going on. Good, yes, desirable, often, but I wouldn't call it "essential" to the art of programming. I once worked for a company whose data was managed by a COBOL application on a mainframe a couple hundred miles away; there was no walking down that abstraction ladder (without shelling out a five-figure support fee), so our in-house IT department had to take advantage of the fact that the 3270 terminal emulator we used to access the mainframe, could be driven through a COM interface. I'm sure there are lots of other examples of jobs that don't have the luxury of being able to step down and verify lower-level code, and I wouldn't characterize them as missing out on some "essential" aspect of programming.