Comment by Retr0id
3 years ago
It feels like a lot of "things everyone knows" are slowly getting lost over time, as developers work at higher and higher levels of abstraction without deep knowledge of the layers beneath them (which is of course the whole point of abstractions, but they're never perfect)
Being a true "full stack" engineer is a superpower when it comes to performance optimisation, or vulnerability research.
Eh, that’s not really true. Adding abstraction allows for providing APIs that can handle cases like these correctly. For example, Apple provides a very capable versioning system for files that does “the right thing”, which in this case would create a new file for reliability.
Sure, abstractions aren't inherently evil, but bad ones are. The abstraction you described sounds like a sensible one, which couldn't have been designed without a deep understanding of the system as a whole (or at the very least, the adjacent layers).
The people writing an abstraction need to understand the system, but if done correctly the people using it don’t.
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I wanted to be a programmer as a kid, but eventually found it boring and switched to administering systems.
Knowing how code works on systems IS a super power.