> Would you go to a doctor that knows how to remove an appendix, but doesn't know how the circulatory system works? The ability of a surgeon to successfully re

> Would you go to a doctor that knows how to remove an appendix, but doesn't know how the circulatory system works? The ability of a surgeon to successfully remove an appendix necessarily involves a fair amount of knowledge of the circulatory system, so the analogy is flawed. In my experience some people get by just fine only knowing how to address a problem through some particular framework. The point of abstraction in the end is to release people from the burden of considering the details. I think that this is a better analogy: would you go to a massage therapist who knows how to release tension in your back by manipulating your tissue, but doesn't know how neurons and axons work? Perhaps greatness can be achieved by a a therapist who knows the ins and outs of every aspect of your body, but as a patient/customer I am really only interested in the skills of the therapist insofar that they manifest in the ability to relax my back and shoulders. And really, a lot of development problems are like that. People perform well at their development jobs without a firm understanding of the mechanisms and inventions that enable them to perform it in the first place. It's by design. The real problems arise when there is something you really ought to know. For example, if I don't know how memory is allocated by the black box framework I use and memory use suddenly blows up through my interactions with it, the only thing I can fall back on is a lower level understanding. But usually this is fine, and it is someone else's lower level understanding that you fall back on. If you're working high up in a web front-end perhaps you have to consult someone who contributed to a web framework you're using. Maybe you have the wrong approach in a way that leads to instantiating too many objects. On the very low end of software development you may end up having to consult someone who laid the board out and can reason about the operation of the application in terms of the electronics involved. Maybe these two buses shouldn't be used at the same time because of a reflection problem.