> They are the kind of programmers who have a very narrow range of abilities, and whenever they see a problem outside those abilities, they get completely lost.
The vast, VAST majority of programming is of the type OP described. It ugly and has warts, but is good enough to deliver business value. I’ve seen it first hand.
While that may be true, programmers working on these types of projects will end up being better at doing them (they will build it faster, write fewer bugs, and have an easier time fixing the bugs they do write) if they understand more about computers, operating systems, and the tooling around their chosen language and IDE.
Sure, maybe they can still get things done without that knowledge, and it'll work, but that's not really the point.
The vast, VAST majority of programming is of the type OP described. It ugly and has warts, but is good enough to deliver business value. I’ve seen it first hand.
The truth is that developers working on projects like that outnumber everyone else probably 10-1. See https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...