I'd say no, at least not on modern computers. When I learned to code you had the manual for the computer and it contained so much information that was alien to

I'd say no, at least not on modern computers. When I learned to code you had the manual for the computer and it contained so much information that was alien to you - but then you'd start with BASIC and learn to use that to do a few things. Then some more of the information in the manual would start to make sense and you'd start to poke values in to memory locations to achieve things you couldn't do directly in BASIC. After a while you'd start replacing the slow parts of you BASIC program with little machine code routines (worked out from information in the manual). After a while you knew you machine inside and out. What made that all possible though was the limited scale of the computer, while modern computers are essentially the same as they were back then, they're on an entirely different scale which makes it impossible to hold it all in your head at the same time. These day's beginners would better served by learning the logical patterns of programming, which I think are easier to see in modern scripting languages.