• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    nobody understands fully how computers work

    I mean, tap the breaks a little bit, here. “Fully” is doing a lot of lifting.

    I will concede most people don’t understand the concept of transistors, much less the electrical engineering that turns a series of transistors into a CPU. And I’ll spot you that - for any given computer - it would take multiple extended papers to explain every piece of functionality.

    But - broadly speaking - if you a computer engineer, you understand how a computer is engineered. If you’re working in IT, you have enough of a functional knowledge that you can tell what each general component does.

    And if you’re a full stack developer (rather than someone who just does business logic on the backend), you should have a generalized understanding of client versus server versus database and how these pieces fit together. You should also probably have some grasp of the network stack, if for no other reason than you occasionally need to troubleshoot it.

    • vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 hours ago

      I think there are very few if any people who understand computers from the transistor all the way to front-end JavaScript frameworks. At least not deeply and not without major gaps.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        23 minutes ago

        I mean, plenty of people use higher end coding languages to customize the tools they use to make advanced chipsets.

        And, I’m sorry, but JavaScript isn’t that hard to understand - intentionally so. It’s one of the first languages you can learn in grade school.

        I doubt anyone could go end-to-end on hardware manufacturing. But that’s more an issue of parts miniaturization. People build working computer kernels in Minecraft using torches and switches.