I agree with you. But I also think that it's important to have total confidence that the underlying fundamentals are there, that they are utterly deterministic

I agree with you. But I also think that it's important to have total confidence that the underlying fundamentals are there, that they are utterly deterministic, and that you can investigate them at your leisure. I've encountered programmers in high-level languages that have some minimum level of figuring-things-out where they just give up and go "I guess (Rails|Ruby|the web server|the compiler|the VM|the OS|my hardware) just does X" at times when someone really, really needs to understand X because it's deadly important. (You could probably make an analogous argument for logical and mathematical fundamentals.) For a lot of programmers, the minimum level is completely unacceptable -- it's something like "the behavior is in code I didn't write" and they stop trying to understand once that barrier is crossed. I think the easiest way to train people away from that is just by giving them a basic understanding of hardware, assembly language, C, compilers, and operating systems, even if most of that knowledge is only directly useful now and then.