Comments by "Winnetou17" (@Winnetou17) on "Lex Clips"
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@Ayy Leeuz I think you confuse "tool" with "abstraction". When you said: "that is not the purpose of abstraction at all. abstraction is not removed from actuality so you don't need to understand how it works in actuality, nonsense. abstraction is a means of simplifying for those who understand"
That is totally wrong. That is what a tool (or library in broader computer term) does - allows you to apply your knowledge much more easily, without going into the details, but you have to understand how it works, what it does.
An abstraction is just going to give you the ability to use a concept without knowing its implementation details. That includes to not know them at all. Of course, it should still let you know of its limits and side effects, if there are side effects. And because all abstractions have limits, eventually you will learn how they work, when you need something better/different.
For example: can someone learning javascript get good at it and be productive, and give out good code without knowing what pointers are or basic structures, like linked lists ? Absolutely! Of course, at some point, it should learn, or it would be good to learn about them. Like say, they start with frontend development, go into backend development, start using databases and at some point they'll need to optimize a query and then learn that there are hash-based indexes and btree based indexes. Because the language (JS) abstracted the memory management, it lowered the barrier of entry, but that doesn't mean those who use it are useless or that whatever they code (until they learn how everything works from the transistor level up) is bad or garbage. It just means that they're limited in what they can do. And that "limited" is actually still quite sought-after and useful these days when there's a lot of programs, apps, APIs and so on, to be built. Blame it on the hardware which allows programs being literally 10000 slower than a decently optimized one to still be useful.
Overall I think you're wrong, and I agree with Grog. I hope you never used malloc until you properly learned what it has to do, otherwise you're a bad programmer too and should quit the industry. See how ridiculous it is ? You're basically saying that everybody should know assembler before they can use any other language. Insane!
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