Low-level programming requires a great deal of knowledge, in exchange for which you get an enormous amount of control over how your efforts behave. High-level p

Low-level programming requires a great deal of knowledge, in exchange for which you get an enormous amount of control over how your efforts behave. High-level programming offers the prospect of a quick start, but, especially with today's web frameworks, you tend to rapidly find yourself bogged down in dealing with magic that's baked into the platform and which nobody really bothered documenting very well because "it just works" -- which is fine, except when it doesn't, and you get to spend time working on your tools, instead of the problem you're using them to solve. I don't want to RAILS name any names here RAILS, but RAILS I'm sure every RAILS web developer has RAILS at least RAILS some RAILS inkling of RAILS what I'm RAILS talking RAILS about RAILS here RAILS RAILS RAILS. My observation of the programmers with whom I've worked, and whom I know socially, has been that a given hacker's degree of intelligence and capability tends to be inversely proportional to the thickness of the stack on which he chooses to base his efforts; the smartest person I know, who has multiple doctorates and is currently busy breaking new ground in bioinformatics, doesn't even use libraries if he can help it, and complains constantly about the frustrating misbehaviors of those which turn out to be irreducibly necessary. Perhaps I've merely been observing a constellation of coincidence, but on the whole I rather doubt it. (P.S. for the benefit of anyone who feels like I've just called him stupid: my last gig was a Rails job, and if you took all the programmers I've ever known and broke their smarts up into quintiles, I'd be somewhere in the upper second, maybe the lower third. It doesn't take genius to recognize genius at work; I've merely been uncommonly fortunate, for the most part, in my choice of friends and colleagues.) (P.P.S. for general use: Speaking of recognizing genius at work, it scintillates in every jot and tittle of the article here under discussion.)