But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.
Depends what you define as productive programming. Not every problem requires intimate knowledge of the whole stack. Besides, I found that the most important skills for me are not in trying to memorise all the details, but to get good at using reference materials and to look for the structures rather than the nouns.
Depends what you define as productive programming. Not every problem requires intimate knowledge of the whole stack. Besides, I found that the most important skills for me are not in trying to memorise all the details, but to get good at using reference materials and to look for the structures rather than the nouns.