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Comment on The demise of the low level Programmer.parent

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madrox wrote: "In every technology stack, there's always some layer below which is unnecessary to understand", which is a fully recursive statement." cwzwarich's comment is in the form of an inductive argument. Why should I not see it as also being recursive?

Most people can't "jump" to a level lower than they are used to working. They have some idea of the overall concepts, yes, but it takes time to get up to speed. Most Java people have some ideas of how the JVM works, but few can jump to (say) the JVM's memory allocator code (even when available) in order to fix problems.

In any case, does a Java programmer need to know chip layout design in order to program, or do you agree that that is "some layer below which is unnecessary to understand"? Yes, someone, somewhere, might have had a problem in Java code caused by noise leaking across from one circuit to another, but you can't seriously expect that most people will be able to jump there if needed.

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