Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

That's like saying, "to understand why the automobile is valuable, you need to suffer through a horse and carriage".

You don't need to suffer through yesterday's problems to understand today's.

Fair point. But I know that for me knowledge of machine-level or at least C-level code is requisite know-how to comfortably build abstractions on. I'd have a problem starting in the middle of a stack at a boundary someone else has drawn for me, and which at times seems arbitrary to me (speaking in terms of general knowledge scope, not about work on a particular project). I frankly don't get how this' generations young developers can cope with this kind of ignorance and unknown territory in their stack (but I admire or pitty them for it rather than looking down to them).

I don't think it's about suffering yesterday's problems to understand today's. Learning to program in C made me a better programmer because I had to watch out for memory, etc. I think a better analogy would be how even with modern animation software, great animators still recommend being able to draw well with pencil and paper ("lower level", slower) to develop a sense for the nuances of animation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com