From both my own experience and the experience of teaching people, those "gory details" are the nouns and verbs that compose higher-level abstractions. I haven'

From both my own experience and the experience of teaching people, those "gory details" are the nouns and verbs that compose higher-level abstractions. I haven't written C++ in anger in a decade, but it informs what I'm looking at when I'm reasoning through how V8 or the JVM is going to handle my code. I've been required to teach people in the top-down manner that has left knowing gaps and rendered them without the tools necessary to solve their problems. That's not to say somebody who eagerly learns on one's own may be fine. Of course they might, so long as they have a way to determine what they need to learn. But most people don't eagerly learn on their own, and so a prescriptive "start at the bottom and build up" provides the necessary knowledge and grounding despite themselves.