To be fair, there's always a dividing line. Usually, "knowing how a computer works" for a programmer is equivalent to knowing the programmer's model for a cpu.

To be fair, there's always a dividing line. Usually, "knowing how a computer works" for a programmer is equivalent to knowing the programmer's model for a cpu. A programmer's model is most definitely not how a computer really works (cf. recent cpu security flaws with speculative execution), but it's usually good enough. Knowing more and deeper information is usually a good thing, but students don't need to learn it all at an introductory level which I think this article is focusing on.