Comment by pcwalton

Sometimes, when working on higher-level code, you have to dig into the plumbing layer. For example, I've been writing low-level GPU surface code lately, since SDL and the like are not suitable for our use case (web browsers). There's no getting around message loops and HWNDs if you want to put something on the screen. So it's useful to know the internals, even if you'd never want to write an app that way.