> Hard disagree. I think we primarily make progress as engineers (and a species) by making better abstractions. Abstractions are produced and consumed. You can

> Hard disagree. I think we primarily make progress as engineers (and a species) by making better abstractions. Abstractions are produced and consumed. You can make your abstractions better, but that doesn't mean you won't have to deal with leaky abstractions done by others. Also, having depth in understanding is not only good in cases of leaky abstractions. It's also good to have a better breadth of options for what's out there. If layer B is built on layer A, but you just know B, you might end up building layer C on top of B that's very much like A, but worse in bloat and convolution. Like making a server that serves requests passed as files via NFS because you didn't know TCP sockets existed.