An old debate! Here's a counterpoint from a Steve Yegge piece written nearly two decades ago: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/practical-magic https:

An old debate! Here's a counterpoint from a Steve Yegge piece written nearly two decades ago: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/practical-magic https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/practical-magic > I wrestle with the whole abstraction question, and I'm still not sure where a good engineer these days should draw the line — the one below which it's all just magic. > We all have that line somewhere; I encountered mine in school, back in my semiconductors course. We were (ostensibly) learning how semiconductors work, but it was perfectly clear to me that this was just magic, and I was never going to understand it — in part, because I didn't want to make what was clearly going to be a HUGE effort to get it. There was all this crap about K-spaces and lattices and who knows what else. Maybe they'd listed the prerequisites wrong, but I did not have the math foundations to understand what was going on. > It didn't help that my professor was 100% senile, either. Once a week he'd break into his senile rant about what an Amazing Device the Human Eye is, totally forgetting that he'd shared this insight with us every week since the quarter started. We'd all recite the story along with him, sometimes jumping ahead, which he senile-ly mistook for us being just as big fans of the Human Eye as an Amazing Instrument as he was. It was really damned hard to concentrate in that class, and at the end of the quarter, my Human Eye was Amazed to see I'd almost failed it, which signalled clearly that it was Time to Change Majors. I'd found that I love programming and detest hardware, so staying a Computer Engineering major probably wouldn't be too wise. > So I transferred into the UW's Computer Science department, which meant switching from Engineering to Arts & Sciences, which meant taking a bunch of extra foreign-language and froo-froo social anthropology classes, where I got to watch films of dolphins counting to five through their blow-holes. Which is about how smart I felt after that semiconductors class. I felt like I could have made it as a dolphin. > It took me an extra year, but I finished in CS instead of CE, which allowed me to conveniently pretend that computer hardware, starting somewhere down at the level of the doping barrier in a silicon semiconductor, is just pure magic. Parts of the hardware above that level are still a little murky, but I have a pretty good idea how computers can be made by assembling successively larger components together from smaller ones. Given time and a gun to my head, I could probably start with any set of smaller components and derive how to build higher-level abstractions: transistors into logic gates, logic gates into larger assemblies that do arithmetic and boolean computing, those into state machines and ALUs, and so on. I'd suck at it, but I get the general idea, so it's not really "magic". > It's magic when you have absolutely no frigging clue how it works, not the first clue. It just works. That's how it is for me and semiconductors. > But I'm OK with that. I'm OK with treating semiconductors as "atoms" (or axioms, anyway) in our little programming universe. Chips are like molecules, CPUs are compounds, and Von Neumann machines can be bricks and mortar. Well, I'm sure you could come up with a way better metaphor. Whatever. > The point is, the computers and networks and power supplies and so on are all amazingly complex under the hood, but usually I can just pretend they work a certain way, and not worry about how, any more than I have to worry about my Amazing Eye in order to pour myself another glass of fine wine, which I will doubtless use to polish my keyboard if I don't finish this blog entry soon.