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I've seen this article before, and on one hand, I get it. On the other, I think it's a dangerous trap to automatically think that people (in any profession) sho
by silverbax88 15y ago
I've seen this article before, and on one hand, I get it. On the other, I think it's a dangerous trap to automatically think that people (in any profession) should know how to build something in detail from the ground up just to make it work.
Let's take a really great, experienced physician. Does he need to know how to make an X-Ray machine in order to perform neurosurgery? At what point does something, once required, become commonplace so that technology and expertise can evolve?
- Mvandenbergh 15y agoI don't think that's such a good example. Doctors don't build medical equipment, nor do they do anything in that class. Coders write software and the operating system, compiler, VM, etc. that they use as tools are also software. If we want to compare with the doctor, we can say that a programmer doesn't need to understand how junctions of doped semi-conductors behave, nor how that can be used to build gates, nor how those gates can be used to build a processor. The lowest level ever required is to understand the behaviour of the processor (how that behaviour comes to be is a black box). This is because that's the lowest abstraction layer that absolutely doesn't leak.
- silverbax88 15y agoI really did not want to respond to this, but the issue here is that programmers writing software does not justify re-learning problems that have already been solved.