A recent topic on my mind has been how digital literacy in recent years has seemed to be on the decline. The more that devices like phones abstract away important details, such as file systems, local vs cloud storage, app stores vs actual executables and how appliactions interact with the OS just to name a few.

I think this same concept can be applied to programming lanaguges and new developers quite a lot. I remember trying to develop simple applications back in highschool, and running into errors so far abstracted that without instructional teaching from a course or university or something of the sort, I'm not sure I could have resolved them on my own. Simply looking through tutorials of discord bots, there is so much that you wouldn't understand if you only look at the surface level of code in an environment as abstracted as Node.js or anything of the sort.

Around halfway through my univeristy's CS curriculum, undergrads are taught the basics of how software works and interacts with components at a low-level, something that personally added a world of clarification to all the code I'd written in the past. I think without learning these key components, you lose a lot of what makes programming fun. You work without the complete mental map/model of what the computer is actually doing and I feel that takes a huge toll on developer's intutitions as a whole. Being able to program but not understand all of what you're working on is a fascinating paradox but it also makes me concerned as for our progression in computing. It often makes me feel as though we as programmers are taking steps in the wrong direction.

../blog