C'mon HN! This is DH3 at best. Don't let your egos get the better of your words. The obvious domain generalization is a much harder (but hardly impossible) sta

C'mon HN! This is DH3 at best. Don't let your egos get the better of your words. The obvious domain generalization is a much harder (but hardly impossible) statement to argue: Yes, there are people out there who couldn't <use basic building block of their field> if they had to, and have never heard of <some atomic concept they implicitly use every day>. We call them bad programmers. Guess what: they're everywhere. So the question becomes "if you only know how to function within some high level of abstraction are you effective at what you do?" I'd suggest that this holds pretty well if the level of abstraction you're using is too leaky. I don't have the slightest idea how to time an HD seek operation, but I can write to a file with a great deal of robustness. I think the op has a point though that if you operate mostly with RoR you might be ignorant to a non-trivial amount of detail which will relegate your work to being lower quality. My personal belief is that "web frameworks" aren't a sufficiently compartmentalized level of abstraction. RoR holds the opposite philosophy (evidenced by marketing and the opaqueness of Active Record, for instance) which causes a great deal of impedance when you have to dive into lower level concepts which were supposed to have vanished via RoR. So I agree with the op in that if you can only create things using RoR abstractions, you'll probably be in trouble before too long.