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> 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? Y

> 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? You should know one abstraction layer deeper. In this case one abstraction layer would be that the therapist knows what muscles there are in a back and where they are. You can administer massages without knowing it just by memorizing patterns, but you would get a lot better and can handle more cases if you know about the muscles. Similarly you can become productive using a framework without knowing anything about how the framework works underneath just by memorizing patterns which works, but you would get a lot more productive and can handle more cases if you had a decent understanding how the framework is implemented.

boomlinde 7y ago
> You should know one abstraction layer deeper. More generally, I'd say that it's a matter of what improves your ability to perform the work you want to perform weighed against the possibly diminishing returns of investing time and energy in understanding things in more and more detail. Depending on the circumstances of your work, this may favor digging into more than a couple of abstraction layers (for example, an embedded developer that knows both software, digital circuit design and electricity can be immensely useful) or it may favor unquestioningly accepting the layer of abstraction you target as the whole truth (for example if I'm working on expressing some performance insensitive business glue logic for some proprietary platform, in which case I don't even have a choice).