It's perfectly acceptable to not understand the low level details of seriously used systems. Isn't that what teams are for? You can trust the engineers developing infrastructure so that you don't have to worry about it. Sure, understanding the high level concepts can't hurt, but it isn't going to make a front-end developer any more productive.
I disagree with the last point. Understanding the low level details of a system definitely makes a developer more productive.
When I am working on an iOS app and I get stuck on a bug, I can open a disassembler and immediately figure out the cause of the bug. The same goes for a ruby developer who wonders why their queries are taking forever or a front end developer who doesn't know why their interface is dropping frames.
Any serious engineer should be able to fix these problems on the spot if tasked with it.
The engineers can't really do that for all cases [1]. Understanding abstractly what's going on at least a few layers up and down your stack will definitely make a front-end developer more productive, if by productive you mean able to complete a finished product rather than just a buggy first draft.
> It's perfectly acceptable to not understand the low level details of seriously used systems.
Yes, that's what my colleagues thought a few months ago, too, when they churned up a web UI for an embedded device. My teamwork was, apparently, insufficient to make them realize that a configuration interface that takes half the available flash space is rather large (the other half was taken by a goddamn kernel, a web server, a proxy server, a bunch of other networking tools, a logging service and all the tools that communicated with the web ui!). Lack of understanding regarding how routing works in TCP/IP networks also meant that their first attempt had a pretty fatal flaw which resulted in the configuration interface becoming inaccessible, which became apparent in the first ten minutes of testing and required a significant amount of redesign because the entire workflow of the interface depended on that.
Their Bootstrap wizardry was remarkable, but ignoring how the underlying system worked resulted in them having to start from scratch.
It works the other way 'round, too. Not understanding how web tools work would also make my systems programming entirely useless when it has to provide the infrastructure on which such tools rely.
No one likes all this complexity. I hate it, too. I sometimes truly, really wish my job was as simple as taking this thing from here and putting it over there. Ignoring this complexity doesn't make it go away though; building tools that can isolate some of it behind a comprehensive and consistent interface is ok, but relying on those tools to do it for you without understanding what they do is technical suicide. It's this kind of thinking that makes people think it's ok for a rudimentary word processor to take six fucking seconds to load, after asking you for a password, in 2014, on a quad-core system.
Edit: it's also worth pointing out that this is really beyond the scope of the article's argument. What the article insists is that this:
hardly helps anyone learn coding as a problem solving tool. This exercise taught the reader exactly nothing about how to solve the problem of sorting numbers. I could ask someone who works for me to sort me those numbers, and my understanding about algorithmic thinking would be as rudimentary as before.
Teaching children how to use calculators does not increase their problem-solving ability, not by an iota. Teaching them mathematics does that, and their ability is further advanced when they learn about theorems and structuring proofs, about induction and, yes, about using a calculator.
It's the same here. I'm not arguing that computer science should be purist to the extent that you shouldn't use anything but a Number 2 pencil to program. That's stupid. I am arguing, though, that teaching people "to code", as if programming consisted in nothing but translating from English to Codese, is pretty much as retarded as teaching mathematics as if it were a language, consisting of nothing other than translating the English "Two apples and three apples make how many apples?" into the far more cryptic "2 + 3 = ?".
Teaching kids to use calculators DOES increase their problem solving ability. They can produce the same result as someone using paper. If the problem's really advanced, they may have to use brackets correctly too. You teach the same logic whether it's on paper or not, just instead of shuffling numbers in your head, a system that's BETTER at it is doing it instead.
But the issue is, you've added the Calculator dependency to the Kid program. Whether or not that's an issue depends on whether Calculator is a well maintained and dependable project.
On the other hand, there are downsides to NOT using the easier Calculator library, and writing all the code from scratch (i.e. Memorising Mathematics systems and practicing them enough to use them at any reasonable speed) — 1) storage space and using up brainpower / focus storing micro numbers, when you could be focusing on the bigger picture algorithm, 2) speed, the Calculator library is optimised and written by experts, 3) bugs, the Calculator library is well tested, whereas it's easy for anyone to make simple arithmetic mistakes.
