The dillema is that you need to understand the low-level aspects in order to understand the abstractions.

The problem that haunts me -and a lot of other hackers I presume- is that we have this urge to understand every little detail of the systems we design. Nothing is good enough.

The other problem is that by using arcane and primitive tools we limit ourselves in the ability of producing real work. As with everything in life, we need to make the distinction between tinkering and doing real work.

If all we do is tinker, very little gets done :).

PS: I just read the satire Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal [1], my comment could be highly biased from that.

[1]: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html Bonus: Here is a little bookmarklet I wrote for styling unstyled html pages for easier reading.

  javascript:(function() { document.body.style.maxWidth='700px'; document.body.style.margin='0 auto'; document.body.style.lineHeight='1.5'; document.body.style.fontSize='20px';} )();