Too much abstraction is a bad thing (Score 3, Insightful)

Maybe I'm an old fashioned has-been but people doign software development should understand the fundamentals of how computers work. That means that they should understand things like memor management, they should understand what a pointer is, they should undertsand about how tight loops versus unrolled loops might affect the performance of the caches on their system. I meet so many "programmers" that have no understanding that there are architectural constraints on what they can and can't do. Software runs on hardware. If you're going to write software and treat the hardware as a black box, you're not going to write it as well, or as efficiently as you could be doing it.