Some months ago I had to learn React for a project. I was struggling a lot. The documentation was so poor. And everything looked so inconsistent (it still does.

Some months ago I had to learn React for a project. I was struggling a lot. The documentation was so poor. And everything looked so inconsistent (it still does...) and the "solutions" on stackoverflow looked so arbitrary. Until I remembered the lessons I had learned in the past and sat down and studied how it was internally working. Then things started to make sense. I think it's an advantage to be able to mentally map high-level constructs to low-level operations. (Edit) Learning the low-level stuff first can help to understand what problems high-level languages are trying to solve. For example, the first languages that I learned were assembly and BASIC. Many people said that learning such low-level languages would make it harder for you to learn abstract thinking and structured programming with high-level languages. For me, it was quite the opposite. Writing complex programs in BASIC was so cumbersome, it made me appreciate programming in C with local variables and data structures. After mastering function pointers in C and discovering that you can elegantly express operations on "living" data structures with them (I wrote simple game engines and world simulations for fun), the concept of messages and methods in OO languages looked so natural when I first learned about them. And once you witnessed the mess of complex interdependencies in large programs (with or without multithreading), immutability and functional programming looked like the right way.