As everyone has already said, it depends on whether you're interested in doing the job, or learning how something works. There's a good chance I'll never use assembler level code in my professional career, but learning how this lower level works gives me a deeper understanding of the higher levels.

The only case where you really need to use lower levels is for efficiecny reasons. The higher the level of abstraction, the worse the efficiency. However, on the occasions when you do require maximum efficiency (and these cases are far more rare than a lot of people think), then it's good to be able to drop into the lower level.

Another point, though, is that the more mature a level of abstraction is, the smarter it is about being efficient. Early 3GL languages were probably amazingly inefficient, which is why heavy use of inline assembler was necessary. This is now the case with things like Class::DBI. But maybe in 10 years time, we'll very rarely need to write SQL statements, and the DB abstraction layers will be smart enough to optimise even complex queries for us automatically.

The ultimate goal of Information Technology is to reach the highest level of abstraction possible. If this goal is ever achieved, then it won't just be SQL we won't need to worry about, it'll also be Perl.

In reply to Re: Appropriate amount of abstraction by Mutant
in thread Appropriate amount of abstraction by gunzip

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