Discussion Thread.

With all the frameworks and libraries available and game engines to develop games, its now easier than ever to build stuff.

With this in mind, do you think its necessary to have a core knowledge of how stuff work under the hood? Or is it okay to build upon and develop new stuffs on the foundations available today?

For example, in the past people used assembly language and had to code separately for every device. Since then, we have build high level languages that saves us the trouble. Is it, in the present context, necessary to learn those basic stuffs to become a good programmer? Or is it okay to take the languages we have today and build better platforms for future generations?

+1

I think using existing tech without understanding its internals is no problem.

If i tried to understand everything i work with in detail, i would not have time to do my work.

Though, disassembling libs has led to situations when i new stuff better and with more detail than the companies support team.

"How do you know?"
"Blackboxtesting... and a feeling"

@CWins Thats a pretty satisfying answer, thanks

There's no shame in learning modern abstractions and making new, cool shit with them. Python? Ruby? C#? Java? Knock yourself out.

There's a certain elitism some people have that carries over from mathematics: "oh we're not going to show you the fast way until we've made you do it the hard way a million times and made you derive the fast way on your own." Ignore that. Learn it if and when you need it.

Having an understanding of how things work under the hood will be helpful when trying to diagnose performance problems or edge cases where the abstractions hide the real problem.