I saw this Mastodon post from Andy Wingo recently:    in these days of coding agents and what-not, i often think of gerald sussman's comm...

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A personal essay reflecting on the importance of truly understanding software systems rather than treating them as black boxes. Drawing on a career journey from fumbling with BASIC and DOS in the 90s to eventually embracing deep comprehension as a core skill, the author argues that the instinct to avoid understanding—to just poke at things until they work—is ultimately far harder than committing to learning how things actually function. The author pushes back on Gerald Sussman's famous observation that modern programming is just 'doing basic science on foreign libraries,' contending that open source has made understanding vastly more accessible than in the closed-source 90s. A concrete Android layout bug story illustrates how reading source code beats endless experimentation. The central thesis: understanding is the most powerful tool a programmer can have, and it only gets more valuable over time.

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