I think you're wrong, and I don't know what the point of making up numbers is. It might be your experience that you've been able to treat garbage collection as

I think you're wrong, and I don't know what the point of making up numbers is. It might be your experience that you've been able to treat garbage collection as magic, and that's nice, but it's not been mine. I was speaking generally, about all programmers, not just web developers. My point was that if you don't have any understanding of how garbage collection works, you simply don't have all possible tools at your disposal when you need to debug a memory leak. I'm not suggesting every programmer needs to have spent years hacking on garbage collectors and studied all of the literature, just that having some familiarity with the tools available to you is important. And this was just one example meant to support my main argument that gaining understanding below the level of abstraction you are working at is not a bad thing.