You can get more done knowing less now, but essentially, all you do by using other people's code is gain some leverage towards a specific problem. When your lev

You can get more done knowing less now, but essentially, all you do by using other people's code is gain some leverage towards a specific problem. When your leveraging tool fails you and you have to debug or extend it, a strong sense of CS topics lets you distinguish the map from the territory. The downside of absorbing CS wisdom is in being sophomoric about it and trying to apply the most powerful, generalized and optimized technique you have ever heard of to a problem you have encountered for the first time, writing a giant edifice of code while misunderstanding what the technique actually does. It's always been possible to get very far in programming with crude techniques and a large amount of persistence, and you will be a more grounded programmer for attempting an approach that is wary of abstraction - abstraction in the language, in libraries you use, in the way you try to extend code. Try writing excessively primitive code until it becomes painful - simple assignment, branching, arrays and lookup tables, maybe a function call - then gradually sprinkle in the abstractions, and you'll have the right balance.